Contributions

In the early days of Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 he co-developed the X-Word word processor for Linux, one of the first WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

 word processors for Linux. Although X-Word was never completed, its dependency on Motif

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

 led the Hungry Programmers team led by Chris Toshok to implement LessTif

LessTif

LessTif is a free software reimplementation or clone of the Motif computer programming toolkit, developed by the Hungry Programmers.As opposed to Motif, which is distributed under a proprietary license that can require the payment of royalties, LessTif is distributed under the GNU Lesser General...

, a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 alternative to the Motif

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

 toolkit.

With the Hungry Programmers he launched one of the early efforts in the 1990s to create an open source Java Virtual Machine

Java Virtual Machine

A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...

 called Japhar. Japhar's main contribution was the open source implementation of the class libraries, these class libraries would eventually become part of GNU Classpath

GNU Classpath

GNU Classpath is a project aiming to create a free software implementation of the standard class library for the Java programming language. Despite the massive size of the library to be created, the majority of the task is already done, including Swing, CORBA, and other major parts. The Classpath...

.

Chris later worked at Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

 in the Mozilla

Mozilla

Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

 codebase where he worked on the layout engine for Mozilla 4 before joining Critical Path and later joining Ximian

Ximian

Ximian was a company that provided free software desktop applications for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. Ximian was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in October, 1999, and was bought by Novell on August 4, 2003...

 to work on the Evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 calendar application.

At Ximian he would eventually join the Mono

Mono (software)

Mono, pronounced , is a free and open source project led by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime....

 team and would work on various open source implementations from ASP.NET

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a Web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic Web sites, Web applications and Web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages ...

 to Windows.Forms and more recently an open source implementation of Silverlight for Unix systems called Moonlight

Moonlight (runtime)

Moonlight is a free and open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight for Linux and other Unix based operating systems, developed by the Mono Project...

.

In 2007 together with Alex Graveley he created the Pyro Desktop

Pyro Desktop

Pyro Desktop is a new type of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing....

, a desktop environment for Linux systems based on Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

.