Matthias Ettrich is the computer scientist credited as the founder of the KDE project since he proposed a "consistant, nice looking free desktop-environment" [SIC] for UNIX using the Qt GUI toolkit on USENET in 1996.
Ettrich was born in Bietigheim[?], South Germany, educated in Tübingen and currently resides in Oslo, Norway. He is currently employed by Trolltech, who developed and continue to actively maintain Qt.