14 Facts About Sam Hocevar

Samuel Hocevar was born on 5 August 1978 and is a French software and video game developer.

Sam Hocevar was the project leader of the Debian operating system from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008, and one of the founding members of Goatse Security.

Sam Hocevar graduated in 2002 from, after receiving the "Award of Information Technology and Communication" from the SNCF as the most promising student in his class.

Sam Hocevar specialized in electromechanical systems and applied mechatronics, and project management.

From 2005 to 2006, Hocevar was a Wikimedia France board member.

Sam Hocevar has been active in the Debian project, and was elected Debian project leader on 17 April 2007.

Sam Hocevar was succeeded by Steve McIntyre on 16 April 2008.

Sam Hocevar has made large contributions to almost all software of the VideoLAN project, especially to VLC media player and libdvdcss, since 1998.

Sam Hocevar is the author of various free software programs, such as zzuf, a data fuzzer, and libcaca, a color ASCII art renderer.

Sam Hocevar is the current maintainer of the Extension Language Kit Scheme interpreter, which has found use in many multimedia applications including audio processing.

However, as of October 2024, the Elk webpage has been blanked, and Sam Hocevar has not responded to queries about the status of the project or whether the site will be brought back.

Sam Hocevar reverse engineered DVD subtitles in 2000, and in 2005, it was found that the DRM software which triggered the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal had unlawfully pirated open source code from the VideoLAN project which Hocevar was involved in authoring.

Sam Hocevar authored the WTFPL version 2, an extremely liberal, permissive free software license that is recognized by the Free Software Foundation.

Sam Hocevar has been cited for his "whimsical" copyleft activism.