Roberto Di Cosmo is a computer scientist and director of IRILL, the Innovation and research initiative for free software (French: Initiative pour la Recherche et l'Innovation sur le Logiciel Libre). He graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and has a PhD from the University of Pisa, before becoming tenured professor at the École normale supérieure in Paris, then professor at the Paris 7 University.
Di Cosmo was an early member of the AFUL, association of the French community of Linux and Free Software users, he's also known for his support in the Open Source Software movement.

He became famous after releasing a paper against Microsoft in 1998 : Piège dans le cyberespace (Hijacking the world, the dark side of Microsoft). Co-written with the journalist Dominique Nora, this book is now freely available under Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND. His most famous contributions to Linux is also the first « live » linux distribution (2000 to 2002) : demolinux, making possible to boot Linux from a CD-ROM, without setting up the entire distribution.

He was one of the founders, and the first president, of the Open Source Thematic Group within the Systematic innovation cluster. Di Cosmo is a member of the Board of Trustees at the IMDEA Software Institute.