Michael K. Johnson is a Founding Engineer at rPath, Inc., responsible for the development of the Conary software management system and the rPath Linux operating system.

Michael was one of the original Linux hackers. He learned his way around the kernel by re-writing the parallel port driver and turning the /proc filesystem into something capable of supporting all the features of ps (and re-writing ps to use it). He managed the tsx-11.mit.edu FTP site, built low-level tools for kernel interfaces, and ported Emacs to Linux before he learned to love vi. He was the editor of Linux Journal for its first two years. He then joined Red Hat as a member of the operating system development team, where he wrote configuration tools and maintained many packages, then ran Red Hat's kernel team until he founded the Fedora project and guided it through its first release.

In 2004, Michael left Red Hat, and joined Matt Wilson and Erik Troan to design Conary software management system that is the core of all rPath technology.

Michael and Erik Troan are the co-authors of Linux Application Development, published by Addison-Wesley, now in its second edition.