Jim Gettys is a MTS at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, working on bufferbloat. He was the V.P. of Software at the One Laptop per Child project. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT. He worked at W3C and was the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification in the IETF. Gettys helped establish handhelds.org, freedesktop.org and X.org.

Gettys is one of the keepers of the Flame (USENIX's 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award) on behalf of The X Window System Community at Large.