Organizer of the Independent JPEG Group (IJG), one of the most important early open source groups and a major reason why the JPEG image format is a standard, Lane is a computer scientist dedicated to open source software. He was cited in a 2000 study as one of the leading contributors to open source software. His contributions to open source included: Organizer of the Independent JPEG Group (IJG); Member of the core steering committee of PostgreSQL; Co-author of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification; and Member of the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) advisory committee. Lane holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1978) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (1990), where he has occasionally lectured, as well as at other places.
He has been a member of the core PostgreSQL development team and has been involved in all aspects of PostgreSQL, including new features, performance improvements, and bug evaluation and fixes. The IJG is an informal group that writes and distributes a widely used free library for JPEG image compression. It is arguably one of the most important early open source groups and a major reason why the JPEG image format is a standard. The IJG develops and maintains libjpeg, a library written entirely in C which contains a widely used implementation of a JPEG decoder, JPEG encoder, and other JPEG utilities.
Lane and Thomas Boutell, with contributions by many others, wrote the original specification for the Portable Network Graphics (PNG), version 1.0. He also served as a Contributing Editor for PNG Specification, Version 1.1, and has been a member of the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) advisory committee.
Works Lane authored included: JPEG FAQ; PostgreSQL Concurrency Issues; User Interface Software Structures; and Studying Software Architecture Through Design Spaces and Rules.
