I'm sorry if the following sounds combative and excessively personal, but that's my general style.
-- Ian Jackson in [1]
Ian W. Jackson is a long time Free Software author and Debian developer. IWJ wrote dpkg, SAUCE, userv and debbugs, to name a few. He used to maintain the Linux FAQ. He runs chiark.greenend.org.uk, a popular server, home to MindTerm and PuTTY, among other things.
Ian has a PhD (from the Cambridge University) and he currently works for nCipher Corporation (http://www.ncipher.com/).
He became Debian Project Leader in January 1998. Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm) was released during this time. He was also vice-president and then president of Software in the Public Interest in 1998 and 1999.
Wichert Akkerman took his place as Debian Project Leader in 1999. Ian also passed the dpkg maintainership to him later on.
Ian's home page is at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-9804/msg00358.html