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Raphael Linus Levien (also known as Raph Levien) is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. From 2007 until 2018, and from 2021 onwards, he was employed at Google. He holds a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. He also made a computer-assisted proof system similar to Metamath: Ghilbert. In April 2016, Levien announced a text editor made as a "20% Project" (Google allows some employees to spend 20% of their working hours developing their own projects): Xi.
Levien has written several papers documenting his research in Halftone technology, which has been implemented in the Gimp-Print free software package, as well as by several commercial implementations. He also created Gill, the GNOME illustration application which aimed at supporting the W3C SVG standard for Vector Graphics. He states it was named after Eric Gill, the English type designer responsible for the Gill Sans, Perpetua and Joanna fonts. Direct development on Gill ceased around the year 2000, but a fork of its codebase has evolved to Sodipodi, and through it to Inkscape.
In 2009, Levien completed a PhD thesis entitled 'From Spiral to Spline: Optimal Techniques in Interactive Curve Design' and published a standalone essay on the mathematical history of Elastica Theory. He calls the Elastica "A beautiful family of curves based on beautiful mathematics and a rich and fascinating history."
Beginning in 2010, his work with Google largely focused on introducing high-quality, open licensed, well organized webfonts to the internet through Google's webfont API. Here, his experience with typographical technology, history and industry helped to shape the development of this growing resource, though he has since moved on from the project to work on Android fonts and text layout.
One of his own fonts, Inconsolata (named in 2009 as one of the ten best programming fonts by Hivelogic, and generally known for its clean lines and elegant design) is now available within the Google library. Regarding this font and his curves work in general, Levien had to say, "And, in fact, I don't just use the , I use a mixture of curves (my package is called Spiro, which is kind of an abbreviation for polynomial spirals). Most Inconsolata (the monospaced font mentioned above) is drawn using G4-continuous splines, which are a very close approximation to the Minimum Variation Curve of Henry Moreton. I now think that's overkill, and G2-continuous splines (the Euler spiral ones) are plenty, and could be done with fewer points."
The site has been successful from the point of view of the first criterion, surviving many attacks aimed at subverting the attack metric, made both by developers trying out attacks, and by spammers. The site has needed only relatively minor changes to cope with these. The site's trust metric provides, alongside Epinions, one of the two most important datasets used in the empirical analysis of trust metrics and reputation systems. Levien observed that Google's PageRank algorithm can be understood to be an attack-resistant trust metric rather similar to that behind Advogato.Chapter six of (Levien 2006).
The site has had a more rocky road as a forum for free software developers, and currently hosts less discussion than at its peak as developers have moved from forums to . Due to this, Advogato has added a syndication feature that includes the weblogs of its current certified developer base. It remains one of the earlier networking sites and is still a place for active discussion on the development of free software.
ZD-Net's Interactive week summarised the issue that patents pose to the free software community:Peter Wayner, ZD-Net Interactive Weel, 8 November 2001. Levien provided an annotated summary of the article.
As a resolution to this conflict, in March 2000, Levien made a patent grant of his patent portfolio to the GPL community.
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