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Category: Unsung Hero
As we all know, there are certain people who have achieved a lot of fame in the Open Source world. This award isn't for them. This award is designed to put ten grand into the pocket of someone who has contributed to the open source movement in a significant way but has never gotten the spotlight that they deserve. Talk about it.
And Nominate the person who deserves it most.
I'm unsung and kind off an hero... Does that make me qualified?
I realize I'm going to get a lot of argument about this nomination, but I'm not going to discuss, I'm just going to do it: I nominate Richard M Stallman.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
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definitely a hero, definitely unsung. he's been working on xfree86 for eight years. we all use X. although you'd really want to give the gong to all four founders of the project.
Alfredo and WindowMaker get zero hype, but it's IMHO the stablest, best looking and most usable desktop out there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
For his tremendous efforts in bringing Open Source stuff to the Mac. He has authored MacPerl and GUSI (a POSIX library for Mac OS), and has ported many other Unix Open Source programs. Hip hip, hooray!
Any large group, such as open-source-anauts, must have a shared culture of some sort. The Simpsons is it in this case. Without Groening, where would be?
I truely believe JKH's contribution to the FreeBSD project deserves recognition. I have been constantly impressed with the quality and completeness of the fbsd distributions over the past few years. I trust no other OS to perform as reliably and to be as easily maintained.
I nominate David Hinds for the sometimes thankless job of maintaining the pcmcia-cs driver package for the last several years.
For over 5 years (The first version in the CHANGES file with a date is 2.8.1, which was released 18-Dec-1995), pcmcia-cs has been one of the mainstays of Linux device drivers, providing lowlevel drivers for pcmcia and cardbus devices, and the card management tools, which I feel work as well or better than any other PCMCIA management system out there for any platform.
Anyone who has a laptop owes a great debt to David, who has never received much recognition for his work. Remember that Linux based laptops were one of the eary entries for Linux into the workplace (but I NEED a Unix system when I travel and a portable Sun is $30,000!), and this would not have been possible without David.
jf
- the active maintainer of the CMU EFnet IRC server,
- the author and maintainer of the INSANELY cool infobot project (http://www.infobot.org/),
- and most importantly, the unpaid organizer of the non-profit Yet Another Perl Conference (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/yapc/), a grass-roots open-source conference that turned out far better than O'Reilly's $1,000-per-person corporate-oriented Perl conference.
Sure, this isn't the kind of visibly heroic evangelistic effort that you see from people like RMS and ESR and Bruce Perens... but then, if you're looking for unsung heroes, I couldn't think of a guy who deserves it more.I've got two nominations
First, Jordan K. Hubbard. jkh has been the somewhat-unofficial leader of the FreeBSD group for years now, and has somehow kept his cool no matter how much people are going bezerk around him. Search the freebsd-* mailing list archives, and get a good example of his character.
Second, Marshall Kirk McKusick. He's always been present to remind the *BSD groups of past mistakes, and giving guidance. He's also contributed Softupdates, which is kinda a paranoid version of mounting your filesystems async. Anything that speeds up disk access as much as softupdates does without adding any data risk is quite worthy of recognition.
You want open source? You can look at his creations in VRML, watch them being built, and see them tested. You can learn from his mistakes and see how his creations evolved.
Open source doesn't have to mean software.
No Zen is good zen
Jamie Zawinski is one of my all time heros.
/.
He speaks his mind with conviction and brutal honesty.
He helped build Netscape back when it meant something, he's an open source advocate, releasing all this hacks, and he's one of my favorite story posters at
jwz deserves recognition for just being himself. We could all learn a lot from Jamie.
...for his excellent unix programming books.
Seth is a man who stands up for his principles and lives by them. He refused to take a loyalty oath to the Constitutions of California and the US because of his capitalist-anarchist views. Because of that, he was not allowed to take his job at the University. (He works for LinuxCare now; I saw him at LWE this past summer at the Loki booth.) As well, he helped organize Windoze Refund Day. My personal love of Seth derives from his smalll comment that introduced me to this world: "Do you read Slashdot?"
So, he's a community builder and a principled open-source advocate. Seth Schoen.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Without his work on mod_perl, many of the open-source-based solutions on the web wouldn't be possible -- among them, the site you're reading now....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
The C library is at least as critical to the success of Linux as the kernel, but few people know the name of the person who's mainly responsible for its success, Ulrich Drepper.