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Vote:Unsung Hero
The Unsung Hero is the guy that has done so much work to help make this Open Source thing great, but he just doesn't seem to end up getting his share of the spotlight. The nominees are Alan Cox, David Dawes, Donald Becker, Jordan K. Hubbard and Brian Paul.
Vote for that you think hasn't got the credit he deserves for all his hard work.
So, the nominations just include the usual suspects. People like W. Richard Steven have been skipped - well ok, the comunity still needs people to bash.
Yes, where is Natalie Portman?
umm, no. FreeBSD was used in corperate america for years. Linux was laughed at, but FreeBSD wasn't. The managers thought of them as college-degree programmers (ie, the Berkeley bit), and many companies built and still build off the BSD systems. BSD was known as 'the box in the corner the business grads are afraid to touch because the admin never does.'
No one ever said tha Linux hasn't helped, as FreeBSD definately got companies a bit used to open source. But when ESR speaks on such things he always twists it around, to attack BSD. It would be nice if he'd do something productive, instead of protend to be a philosopher...
by kuro5hin
For a long time now, those who want to use and improve the slashdot code have been wondering, and waiting, and hoping for the much promised 0.4 tarball. Many of them have in fact become quite irate about the lag between code releases, the lack of a CVS server, and the overall appearance that the slashdot gang doesn't practice what it preaches ("release early, release often"). How would you respond to these criticisms, and do you intend to change the development practices in any way in the future?
CmdrTaco:
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay the release by 24 hours each time someone asks me when a new Slash tarball will be out.
Seriously, there are only 3 people who really know how much work a source release for this is: CowboyNeal, Patrick and Me. And the three of us have been working on a lot of stuff. As I write this, we are bugfixing and documenting and preparing for a source release. There is a private CVS server that one day soon will be publicly read only.
This isn't like other projects: it has been custom fit to our hardware and to our needs. It doesn't have install scripts or help or even comments in the code. We're just too busy to play tech support helping dozens of people compile mod_perl and tune Apache. We've decided to squash the bugs and make a clean release rather than rush it.
It's really easy for someone to complain that I didn't release a new version of the source code every week. Its also easy to forget that in the last 6 months we've doubled in traffic and we've had to optimize our code and hardware to handle that. A new source release is secondary: Our job is running Slashdot. We want to release new versions of Slash, but it is a definite second priority to keeping Slashdot moving.
Finally, it's coming soon. It'll be out when its finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
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i think 'abstain' would be to abstain from voting on that choice!
Isn't it a remarkable coincidence they speak english on your planet too.....
Is linux smashing the path for FreeBSD?
Which FreeBSD-STABLE are you referring to? The entire CVS branch?
-bugg
Why did no women make it onto the voting list?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
When I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the dead tree edition), it struck me how well he presented the BSD case in a world where few people look beyond the CNN headlines.
<ObTroll>
I disagree with Eric Raymonds insinuation that the BSD license caused the fragmentation in the BSD camp. The legalistic battles don't deserve the credit this insinuation gives them. I've always written the fragmentation off to too many strong egos.
<ObTroll>
Jordan Hubbard, as well as FreeBSD, deserve more credit than they sometimes get. Bickering about who was first to break the ice, who is more Open or more Free is entirely counterproductive. I'm still torn on the question of whether world dominance by Linux would be a good thing. On the one hand, I hate to see the fragmentation this world sees, with its duplicated efforts on writing device drivers and stuff. But I'm still leaning to the thought that survival of BSD as a significant underflow is a good thing, in that it broadens the gene pool without undermining Open Source.
Linux brought legitimacy to Open Source, which allows me as a BSD/OS user to run cool stuff like Gnumeric or GIMP. Enough folks from non-Linux communities help bear the weight of building and maintaining such tools, and the broad gene pool underneath such apps bring bugs to light that wouldn't have surfaced as fast if all the world ran Linux with glibc 2.1, which in turn eases the pain of future Linux upgrades.
United we stand. Divided we fall.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
This leaves David Dawes and Brian Paul. Brian Paul wrote Mesa, and is thus hopefully praised for it among people more interested in 3D than me. David Dawes appears to be an "ordinary" XFree worker, who happened to be with the project from the start, and is still working on it in his spare time.
To me, this leaves David Dawes as the perfect candidate for this award. A person doing a lot work in his spare time for an important project, without getting a lot of credit. I.e. a hero that most of the free software developers can relate to.
Mr Hubbard is the obvious choice here. FreeBSD, while it ain't LInux per se, led the Open Source movement into Corporate America. Without FreeBSD-STABLE as the icebreaker with the iron hull smashing a path for us, Linux would not be the wild success that it is.
FreeBSD will always be unsung. But it will also forever lead the way in the less glamorous server market by simply never, ever crashing. We ought to recognize that.
Die-hard Open Source programmer that help maintained and delivered most common Linux network drivers ranging from IDE/PCI Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, 100VG Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, PCMCIA Ethernet and supported Infrared Networking for a wide range of platforms (Intel, Sun, Mac).
Let us not forget Beowulf
I've put many hours support his endeavor and would like to see his name recognized for all of us hard workers.
Unsung indeed, I don't even know who three of em are... (2,4&5)
...
So for all other like me, here some short bio's.
Alan Cox (not spelled Allen Cox) is a primary author of the
linux networking stack, and generally does alot of work for
Linux in a variety of different areas, from suggesting changes
to VNC, to the MMU-less palm-pilot Linux port, to the gnome
project. He is one of the most brilliant Linux developers I know,
and has been the most helpful in enabling me to do my own
Linux development (primarily in the area of PPP, L2TP, and
Multilink PPP). By being brilliant, helpful, approachable, and
available, he
David Dawes was a PhD student in Theoretical Physics when he started playing around with X source code. He is still working in the
same place, at the School of Physics, Sydney Uni, although now he is the Network Administrator. He works on XFree86 in his spare
time.
Did quite a lot of network drivers for linux. Most of the drivers for 3com cards are his.
Hawaiian born, he is one of the big cheeses in the Free BSD
project. He was one of the original founders, as well as the
release coordinator. He lives with 14 cats and works at
Walnut Creek CD-ROM. [14 Cats? That makes him cool by me!]
Brian Paul is the original author of the mesa3d library. (No, it isn't called mesagl! No! Bad neuron!)
I couldn't find out who abstain was, does anybody know?
Sorry that some of the bios are short/incomplete, I either didn't know, didn't care or didn't have the time. Pick any three.