"The Author" ?
This is open source code; there may be 27 authors of the relevant file.
In XFree86 code I wouldn't know how to find the author of a file without
looking at that file. My {limited ,mis}understanding of clean room coding 
makes me wary of reading any source unless I know that its licence will 
allow me to do what I wish.

There is at least a maintainer and usually one person who did the
main work, and this (or these) name(s) can usually be found in the
file's head comment. Also, fbdev authors/maintainers usually hang
around the linux fbdev mailing list. You could have tried to
contact them at least ;)

Ben.




-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn