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Unsung Heroes of Open Source Software?
Yaztromo asks: "Sometimes, as an Open Source Software developer, I wonder if anyone out there is actually noticing the contributions I make to the software they're running. This got me thinking today -- how many Open Source Software packages am I running without knowing or applauding those who toiled in the background to developed them? We all know about personalities like Richard M. Stallman and Linus Torvalds, but there are a lot of unsung heroes of Open Source out there whose names may not be on the tips of everyones tongues. But perhaps they should be. They may be wizard coders, or amazing project administrators, or they provide fantastic support. Maybe they do all three, and more. Or maybe they're the person in your organization who pushed an Open Source solution in the face of an entrenched closed-source solution, and won. Or the one who printed up a whole spindle of Knoppix CD's and handed them out at a user group meeting.
So here's you chance: who is your favorite unsung hero of Open Source Software, and why?"
This is partly what the Open Source Awards are about. Anyone can nominate people or projects for awards and $500 Merit Awards are handed out quarterly. You can see the current list of winners.
Voting will soon get underway for Q3 winners so get nominating!
John.
Inventor of the internet... 'nuf said
Thanks for making it necessary buddy!
CowboyNeal, of course!
dumb question.
All those random people that have single lines in software changelogs... Take this for example. There's a project that helped get support for a popular USB camera out into the wild.
;-) I hear he's really sexy too!
Look all the way at the bottom. There's one guy there that did a TON for the community
ME!!! Just wanted to beat the rush... we all knew it was coming.
Bill Gates, for encouraging thousands of people, including myself, to look towards open source...
playing games on their Windows boxes.
"unsung heroes of Open Source out there whose names may not be on the tips of everyones tongues"
Define "everyone". Ask mom who Bill Gates is and she'll probably know. Ask mom who Linus Torvalds is and expect a blank stare.
We're using Eric's Openthought software at work. It's great and saves $$$.
Commander Taco!
Roblimo!
Cowboy Neal!
...who did a lot of gratis work on Usenet long before most people could even spell I-n-t-e-r-n-e-t.
the dudes that came up with canna and kinput, do they count?
Why the Samba Team of course. Where would we be without it?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Primary author of the GNU libc, co-author of GNU make...also of Hurd (for what its worth).
Also a very cool, unassuming guy.
i like the mascot of freebsd, always a good motivator, and heavily underrated.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
This guy is the ethernet driver guru.
It may not seem relevant now, but there was a time when you had to hunt around for a linux-compatable ethernet driver.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Branden Robinson and Debian's X Strike Force.
For all the crap I'm sure he's had to put up with, I gotta give him props for his effort. Thanks, Branden!
For helping out all of us Schemer's learn the more advanced stuff on IRC. I don't think the guy ever sleeps!
Engineering and the Ultimate
Papa John, Dominoes, Pizza Hut, and the #1 Super China Buffet delivery guy! They make it possible. As well as Corona. but i digress.
If you are nice to people, they will help you in return. The theory of co-operation is what open-source is all about. Slashdot mods themselves perhaps deserve an award, can't be easy browsing at 0 or -1 to spot the gems among the AC's.
p.s. yfi
Both those guys have answered countless questions ranging from the sublime (complex branching problems) to the ridiculous (why doesn't WinCVS work for me?). Props also to Derek Price, who does the releases.
All the more kudos go to these guys since CVS is slowly being superceded by Subversion; Derek, Larry, and Mark are essentially doing the thankless job of legacy tech support.
The Army reading list
I hesitated for about two seconds before nominating myself. I mean, if I don't believe in myself, who else would, or should?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That incident has always symbolised the entire Open Source movement to me -- distributed thinking and determination coming up with a powerful solution, despite all the naysayers' opinions.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
Linux Tro..
oh wait..this is unsung..not sung..ma bad.
David Cross is definitely one of the lesser known hackers of the world. But he's contributed to FreeBSD and fixed bugs with NFS - he's also doing a little filesystem work in his free time.. He's really the guy that keeps everything running smoothly in the RPI Computer Science Department. So I'll just give him a tip of my hat and be on my way.
Gotta get me one of these!
Through his and SCO's efforts he has helped explain what Open Source Software is as well as help quantify its value. Thanks to the various lawsuits, I have seen a perception within my company (Celestica) of Open Source from being "Free" (as in beer) to a collaborative effort by many individuals working on the same goal.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I dont know the names of anyone behind the XFree86 project although it is one of the most important components of an Open Source OS.
cd /usr/src/linux ./) |grep Donald Becker
/drivers there are 232 comments with his name.
cat $(find
or even
dmesg |grep Donald Becker
Just in
umm, the users : )
I'd like to thank the tomcat developers for all their hardwork. How long will it take for IIS to get built in session replication and truly open platform? I'm gonna guess, when hell freezes over.
Like it or not, RMS is a sung hero of OSS.
--
make install -not war
Tireless promoter of Mutt and Vim, and a really nice guy even after all these years of abuse from the n00bs.
Without a doubt, this (http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/) has made my online life easier... Thanks, Myk!
But you ain't a hero until you have an action figure made in your likeness.
Booyah!
Jim Trocki would be near the top of my list. Jim is the creator of mon http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/ and he uses vi.
I have no idea what kind of software that 'Stallman' fellow has written, although I wish him luck -- maybe his project will catch on.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Alexander Viro, a linux kernel hacker.8 &c2coff=1&safe=off&selm=891kot%247uj%40weyl.math.p su.edu&rnum=1
Know mainly for being the "VFS maintainer", he's a great C coder. He's also know for being a "bit" tough with bad code (and with people who write it). I (and may other people) admire him, because of things like this: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
Hrvoje Niksic
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!
Jim McQuillan deserves a lot of thanks for making such a solid product. He is most helpful.
Join me in iClod. (http://www.iclod.com/)
We basically have no heros in the sense of this article. Despite being one of the largest (quite possibly the largest) and most visible OSS comunities it's become something of a distinctive property of our community that we don't have someone that's out there making a lot of noise.
I'm not sure what really defines a hero; in fact most of our "heros" in the F/OSS community probably aren't those who have contributed the most. More often they're just the guys that are stark-raving-mad and don't want anyone to miss the circus.
Chad's columns and weblog prove that CTOs do NOT have to be PHBs, or void of coding skills. He basically brought OpenSource to a good part of the online publishing world.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/
There's still some of his code running on Salon's mod_perl-based publishing system.
The Unix Systems Support Group at Indiana University for spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a year to get software into the hands of people around the world.
then why are you involved in a policy that is inherently collective. open source is not about heros or singing about them, open source is a form of generosity, if you expect something in return then you're barking up the wrong tree.
the best work is a labor of love, enjoying what you do is worth more than all the worlds' accolades. if your effort is genuine and your contribution is worthy then you will be reccognized without having to flap your flippers.
Where would any of us be without Vim? And the one of best Unix like, zealot neutral, Linux distribution on the planet?
I think it'd be cool to have a deck of playing cards featuring Open Source Heros. Like the deck the U.S. made featuring Saddam et al.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Former United States President John F. Kennedy!
I'm not above sucking up for some easy karma.
Sourceforge bridged the gap between open source projects and the general public.
It gave coders the resources they needed to get multi-coder open-source projects to the public.
It gave the public the resources they needed to find the solutions they need and interact with the coders.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
oh, havens no, someone who writes code for a living...! seriously. i like my paycheck. why would i want to give away all my work?
The success of Linux in the early days owed much its stability and the fact that it could be relied on to not corrupt data. The IDE subsystem *just worked*.
Mark Lord wrote the original IDE drivers and also hdparm.
When he lost his sight to diabetes, I acted as his caregiver and "seeing eye person." I helped him write software tools and subroutines for general use in Project Voyager. I watched him move bytes around absolute memory addresses in FORTRAN 77, although the language was supposed to prevent this. He was, as Jerry Pournelle once wrote, "the sane genius." He died in 1988, but he's still one of the greats in my book and in that of everybody who knew him.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
This thread bought tears to my eyes. This is what its all about. I LOVE YOU GUYS.
Nowhere else they understand the value/idea/efforts of OSS. This is where I come to get that mutual nod.
*sobs hysterically*
Why's that flamebait?
Most of the most brilliant programmers out there did it for a paycheck every week.
Is the guy who wrote mIRC less worthy of respect than the guy who maintains X-chat? At least he was smart enough to be able to make a carreer out of his hobby, and is the guy most responsible for the popularity of IRC in the first place.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I agree. A while back we were upgrading our Unixware servers and got invited to a resellers function where many people were spouting Darls script. At the time my boss thought linux = atari or something. Afterwards, he said "wow, they're a bunch of rabid nuts" regarding the scox team. We upgraded to RH Enterprise.
Thanks, Darl...you make Linux what it is
Richard M Stallman and all his GNU band. Linus Torvalds. The softwares I use everyday are: 1. Linux Kernel 2.6.8 2. Emacs 3. GNU Bash 4. GNU Coreutils 5. Mozilla (firefox/thunderbird) Also, I'd like to thank all the Fedora developers. Hoping to see Core 3 soon :-)
All clap everybody!
The more you think about it, the more you realise more work and man hours has gone into GNU/Linux/FOSS than it did to send man to the moon!
The gratitude is a part of the phenomenon in some way.
If you use/contribute, you are a part of a collective.
If you contribute you are appreciated even if nobody knows
explicitly your name.
The satisfaction should come from the context, I guess...
But I can imagine that from an individualistic point
of view this is a big dilemma...
I am to tired now to dive deep into politics
and philosophy... sorry...
Okay, want a name? How about Jim Wilkinson one of the fathers of modern numerical computation. Maybe not unsung, example, but perhaps unknown to most /.'s.
Come on, the man who've kept packaging steaming pile of XFree86 for 11 debian architectures. While upstream supported only i386.
(Yup, I do know that he is sharp with his tongue)
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
OSS isn't about fame and fortune, right? You supposed to write code because you believe software wants to be free (as in beer).
D. Richard Hipp created SQLite, which is now bundled with PHP5. He gives very detailed, personal responses to any questions on the SQLite mailing list. Very nice software and very good support. Thanks Hippster!
This will be a troublesome task! There is lots and lots of people that work on a large project and just one guy, with one patch, changed the way the program behave to make it the most useful program yet born. And they don't walk the street with "I wrote that patch" t-shirts.
Maybe some of the unsung heroes really like to remain unsung. And we all just see the PR guys in front of it.
I could list some of guys in the front of it, but I would let a lot of people that really deserve the credits because of it.
Tim Ney (X.org), Keith Packard (Eye-candy master), Havoc Pennington (DBUS hacker), Jeff Waugh (one of the guys behind the change of GNOME), Owen Tayler (GTK maintainer), Guido Von Rossum (Python).
Also all the Mozilla people, all the GCC people, all the Apache people, all the PHP people, all the people I left out in the GNOME project, all the people I left out in the Python project.
I could go on and on and on and would not list everyone that really deserves. Just expanding the people in the "All the foo project" listed above would create a really big list.
Yes, they deserve our respect, but they get their reward in the money we pay for their work. If you want to get them some public kudos, why not submit an article asking for their names?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Mike Rubel, for developing a simple method to take NetApp style snapshot backups on any Linux server.
s /index.html
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshot
Putting BSD on the Mac was another brilliant move by Apple.
:-)
Just buy a mac
HP. For making proprietary printer software that pissed RMS off.
Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
Without John Levon, there is no (present day) Qt GUI for LyX - The Document Processor. And I, along with many others found the earlier XForms GUI for LyX to be unusable. Thanks John for making LyX usable.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
For purposes of organization, all "Real Men of Genius" parodies should be posted under this thread.
This one's for you, Mister Netcraft-Confirms-It's-Dead Guy.
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
I know they've done more to drive the adoption of open source software in my workpalce than anything I could have done with catch as catch can advocacy.
Thanks for the audit BSA! I could never have moved our 80% of our servers and 15% of our desktops to Linux without you.
-dameron
---- DailyHaiku.com, saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.
I think Bill Joy deserves more credit than he gets. After all, he invented "vi", part of the FreeBSD release. Without vi, no source code would ever have been written!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Anyone that spends more than 100 hours on a client side javascript web application (with an XML datasource) just to see it featured on another corporate site code verbatim without any mention of the original author or the originating corporation (the only two comments they stripped out) in the code behind... Dave, this one's for you.
Many thanks to Paul Vixie, who's biography can be found here , and accomplishments include:
- technical architect of DNS/BIND
- founder of the ISC (Internet Software Consortium)
- cofounder of MAPS (blackhole)
- CIX router ace & CIX-W maintainer
and many others.
Nigel Cunningham of the Software Suspend project. I've been using this on my laptop for a long time now, and it works great. He's kept development active and is very helpful. definitely makes my laptop more useable. kudos to Nigel!
Russ
What do the good know...except what the bad teach them in their excesses? - Clive Barker
Vic Abell at Purdue, the author of lsof, is my favorite unsung open source hero. He was my boss's boss when I worked at Purdue, and he used to use my workstation to test out lsof on the latest AIX version.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
The Unknown Coder.
To all those about to compile, we salute you.
no, seriously. He mentioned Linux on his late night gig. A popular entertainer mentions Linux, that is a major step towards bringing the ideas of OSS to the mainstream, non-IT culture.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
I propose the creation of a virtual monument, dedicated to the unknown coder, who brought endless lines of code into our open source projects.
We salute you, faceless hackers of the light side!
Oh look, the-unknown-coder.org is still available...I guess it won't be in a couple of minutes from now?
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
This guy created a full CMS almost alone! Looks at the Features list !
Your stereotype is all wrong. Most OSS developers are 20-30 and are either university students or full-time IT professionals. Here's just one survey that I dug up quickly.
OSS developers survey
although his influence on open source in general may not be as large as some of the heavy hitters, he not only opensources his engines after they become less liscensed, but also supports the open source graphics libary, open gl.
WARNING
The Linux kernel contains a ton of their code, yet they get none of the glory except for my $699 licensing fee.
Who doesn't use Gaim?
Why pose this question towards Open Source developers only?
Seriously, do all of the other developers out there already get enough credit? I'm pretty sure that for the most part, Open Source developers are already MUCH more visible than your average closed-source developer.
I'm certainly not attempting to detract from OS developers, but I really don't see the point in drawing a line here except to open up some sort of this camp is better than that camp can of worms.
No Comment.
dmesg |grep Donald Becker
Is Donald Becker connected to yor computer as a peripheral device?
Larry Wall We probably wouldn't have had the Web as we know it without Perl (we wouldn't have had Perl vs Python flamewars either, though).
Mark Finlay (Sisob) Rest in Peace
Contributions to rhythmbox and driving force behind gnomesupport.org
Jonathan Corbet, the editor of Linux Weekly News (lwn.net).
And Evan and the rest of the Adium team!!! WHAT WOULD ADAM ISER DO!?
'nough said
an ill wind that blows no good
The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.
Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.
Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.
Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.
Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.
Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.
Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.
And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.
Because Gossip is quite possibly the best Jabber client ever made.
showing us that even big IT guys can get jiggy with it!
But I shall remain Anonymous in a true spirit of an Open Source :)
I even donated a little to the charity he suppports. If anyone isn't aware, I know it's hard to miss the splash message, but vim is charitywre. Bram wants doantions to be sent to iccf holland which are used to help children in Uganda. I use this editor every day that I use a computer (which is pretty much every day) and I think it's great that Bram uses his work to help others less fortunate.
-- john
Guido van Rossum for Python
Jim Fulton for Zope.
I have no idea who it was (Linus?), but whoever wrote string.h gets my vote, sung or unsung, just for this line:
extern char *strfry (char *__string) __THROW;
Not a belly laugh, but I found it a very funny distraction when I was deep in some coding project and happened upon it by accident.
There is an ancient hindu tradition of creating anonymous works.
The authors (or the maintainors) never left their names in the body of literature or text. We can only guess at the people who created those ancient texts from other sources. The reasoning for doing that [i guess] was that, the work if it can, will survive because of its own ability and the fame for that work is same as fame for its author.
It is perhaps the same thing that prompts us to contribute to the OSS - so that we can feel that at least a part of our selves survive through them.
~561
The different Jakarta and/or Apache projects are such a valuable resource I can't even begin to evaluate the amount of time and money I've saved over the years using them.
Most of the applications I'm maintaining on a daily basis use multiple Jakarta Commons components and run on Tomcat. The quality of support from the community far exceeds the quality of support we get for most of our commercial components / products.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Everyone who's contributed documentation to the Linux Documentation Project.
David Hinds, maintainer and big developer of the PCMCIA packages for Linux.
That man alone has pretty much made Linux on laptops usable.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Charles Cazabon, author of getmail, for showing us how an open source project (and the associated mailing lists) ought to be managed.
Just kidding :P
Bug fixing aint sexy but it is very very necessary.
...for all the fame and notoriety that comes with it. Maybe if I develop a killer new algorithm, everyone in the world is gonna be talking about ME!
I'll be on the cover of "The Inquirer" with my hand on J-Lo's ass, getting into a stretch limo, while wiping the excess blow from my upper lip.
Yep, that's what software development means to me. Paparazzi, supermodels, and illicit substances!
It isn't a memory leak. It's an object life-span issue.
You can't put a price on cute.
========
77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
The number one thing holding back Linux on the desktop. The number one person doing something about that is Sam Lantinga. Aside from creating LibSDL, he has helped create a huge, growing, active community that has grown up around LibSDL. They are developing games with LibSDL on pretty much anything that can run a program and porting it to everything else.
Stonewolf
www.stonewolf.net
Basically, he was admitting that he was looking for a big thanks while not thanking those who's open-source he-himself used.
So basically, you either didn't read, didn't get it, or you're trolling on purpose. I hope that it was one of the former choices.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
David is the kalarm guy. Kalarm may not be the biggest open source project, but his responsiveness about bug reports and feature requests has been amazing.
All those companies who make things like Mountain Dew, Red Bull, Jolt, Bawls, and any other caffeinaceous beverage, for without caffeine we can't function.
This sig no verb.
*dons asbestos suit*
He invented the Internet, and without that, where would we all be?
(More seriously, Yukihiro Matzumoto, _why_the_lucky_stiff_, and other Rubyists.)
Szymon Stefanek started Kvirc ( http://www.kvirc.net ) back when people thought that to use irc on linux meant you had to use bitchx. Mainly due to nothing but his own hard work he created an exceptional irc client that, in my opinion, was as good as anything on windows. Then, with help from people joining the project, they made it better than anything on windows.
Rob Flynn maintains the gaim project ( http://gaim.sourceforge.net ) and took over for Mark Spencer (the original author...who also deserves an award). Thanks to their hard work we have an instant messaging client better than anything else on linux or windows.
It's one thing to say linux is ready for the desktop, but how about we show some appreciation for those that made it not only ready for the desktop, but are responsible for those applications that make it superior to windows for many of our online activities.
Personally, my hats go off to these gents. They saw where linux was lacking and took the initiative to fill those gaps.
Reggie, now over at MySQL, for the development of the ADO.NET connector. Fine piece of work.
.NET environment and he had the solution I liked best.
I needed to access MySQL in a C# and
Well done dude.
Not really unsung, because they had their day, but they were a driving force in changing the idea of a desktop and making professional looking artwork and icons.
Because, after all, some of the code SCO wrote is in Linux. Now Darl, don't be modest, show us what you've contributed!
for bringing the Weakest... Case... Ever... against the GPL; and increasing Linux awareness for all Business Executives where it was needed the most.
I seem to agree that Open Source Developers are unsung heros. ex: many many people contribute to mozilla whatever they can. But yet their names arn't anywhere to be found. (i'm prolly not looking hard enough, but it should be in the "about" window)
To: all Open Source Developers
THANKS! WE APPRECIATE IT!
No, really.
To be perfectly honest, it's Mandrake alone that have worked quite well when I found it to defenestrate a few users. As vilified as they seem to be these days, they make it much easier for the Linux newbie to get involved and get away from Windows. And as crufty as RPM is, gotta hand Red Hat that one; even if apt is better.
Besides, if it weren't for Mandrake, I'd still be using OS/2 Warp 4. =O.o=
This sig no verb.
SCO yes SCO for making a complete idiot of themselves and suing IBM for a product (Linux) that they don't even own. Also for other such hilarious comments as Linux doesn't exsist, Linux is just Unix, and we no longer offer Linux to our customers
He's the guy who made the GPL as solid as it is; and help Linux gain momentum that BSD never could achieve.
Of Refractions Research for PostGIS and bringing geospatial processing out of the domain of the $X0000 'oracle spatial' and 'ESRI SDE' crowd.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I am my favorite unknown Open Source Developer. My project, the "Lars O Matic" never really caught on or even got me a "Nice idea" email.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sometimes, as an Open Source Software developer, I wonder if anyone out there is actually noticing the contributions I make to the software they're running.
Does somebody need a hug???? Come'er! We'll give you one, but it'll be sloppy, overwhelming, we'll argue the whole time we're giving it, and then we'll vanish.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I'd like to name Patrick Volkerding who created Slackware. Slackware is a brilliant (and oldest still going) linux distribution.
Currently i'm using slackware 10.
Davide Libenzi of Xmail Server and Many other great projects is my hero of OSS.
To bad I didn't see this posting sooner.
What could possibly go wrong?
notable for work on bind and cron among other things
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I think that was one of my first "wow" moments with open source: in '97 or '98 I discovered that not only could I recompile my ethernet driver, but when I had a problem with it (Linksys had put out a new card with the same model number but a different chipset) I could email the author and he'd send me a patch.
ESR, for being a pretentious fop.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I'd like to thank the whole Knoppix modding community. The way they add new features to Knoppix and then share them with each other is amazing. I often see the same features merged in newer versions of Knoppix as well. Proof positive that a project fork can be healthy for open source.
Without that guy, and all the porn-meisters who followed him to cash in on geek sexual frustration, the internet would still be nothing more than a curiosity.
Thank god for porn!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
John W. Eaton, developer of GNU Octave. John has been developing the project for over a decade and has produced a serious rival to Matlab for numerical computation. All scientists and engineers should be aware of Octave.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
your missing something, and that's that heros don't do it for the glory. They do it because they enjoy doing what is right. So.. I think what your talking about is being a Zero.
I am always mad, does that make me insane?
Roberto De Leo is the creater/maintainer of The Movix Project, one of the most useful live Linux Distros I have ever used.
With Movix, I can boot up to a linux environment that plays all forms of multimedia. It uses mplayer. It came in really handy my Linux drive died. I was still able to play all the media on my /home partition without issue.
Here's a guy who enjoys his job: The UPS Man
Several years ago (won't say how many) someone at IBM (won't say who) fired a note to an executive (again, won't say who) to the effect of, "When are we going to get off the stick and start porting xxx (won't say what) to Linux?" The exec told two staff guys (etc) to, "Find out what this Linux stuff is all about."
A friend of mine (etc) had his name associated with Linux in a readily internally searchable way, so they called him, and he called me. Over several sessions for the next month or so, by email and telephone, we educated the staff guys on Linux. One guy was truly Sold on Linux, and went on to run his own news mailing for about a year or so.
The presentation was made to the exec - I have a copy, and a thank-you note. Sometime after this, IBM began steering its way onto the Linux course. Incidentally, the unnamed program WAS (and still is) ported to Linux.
So for one brief, shining moment, I actually had my hand on the rudder steering IBM. (Agreed not the biggest hand on the rudder, but it was still there and it moved the direction I was pushing.)
for being an absolute ass when it comes to maintaining license simplicity, source purity, security paranoia, and funny looking pufferfish.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
http://store1.yimg.com/I/ftcollect_1810_47755248
...(What (would (you (do))) (without) (such (a (remarkable language))) as LISP?)
I hereby suggest for your consideration Henry Spencer, only in part for the open source code that he's written -- he was the author of a popular regular expression library, for example. The really massive contribution that Henry Spencer has made, in my opinion is *informed commentary*. He's spent decades hanging around in the C programming newsgroups (not to mention the sci.space.* tree) answering questions intelligently. This is the kind of contribution that I think gets ignored far too often... yes great coders deserve to be honored, but people willing to educate and to do it for free on a volunteer basis, and *do a good job of it* are if anything even rarer.
I am somewhat amazed by how unknown he is to the general public, at least compared to Linus.
Gerard Beekmans is the guy who started the Linux From Scratch project. It's not one of the most popular distro's, but I'm pretty sure it's an important project in terms of inspiration, useful info, and generally helping Linux conquer the world.
How about Erik Andersen, the force behind BusyBox and uClibc? This guy has (nearly) singlehandedly reimplemented linux userland in an insanely efficient manner. There's probably not a single embedded developer/user that doesn't owe him at least a 'thanks, man!'
check it out www.rockbox.haxx -- an open source project for something that is not PC related or uses linux. A huge props to those guys.
-eric
Never heard of Subversion before this. Was planning to deploy CVS in the near future. Is there a summary of Subversion somewhere, explaining why I should use it rather than CVS?
Constitutionally Correct
Isn't this why RMS insists on calling it GNU/Linux: so that the many people who contributed to the GNU part are in some way appreciated, rather than everyone looking solely to Linus "Linux" Torvalds?
It won't work, though. Every successful band, pretty much, has one person fronting it, and it's the same principle. People find it easier to focus their gratitude on just one person.
even when I have to admit that I didn't even know who the author of vim is. I use vim everyday for some pretty big OSS development :)
tels
For DotNetNuke.
IMHO, the best open source content management system.
I'd like to recognize Texstar for creating the PCLinuxOS distribution. It's a great Live-CD that also serves as a great installed distro with a complete online software repository... and who does the huge portion of work on getting this distro built and out? Texstar himself. I won't plug the hosting website, as I help maintain the site. Suffice it to say you could google for PCLinuxOS and find it if you are interested.
*TheDarb
This sig intentionally left blank.
He invented PHP. I learned PHP in 2 weeks, and haven't been unemployed since. Rasmus is the MAN.
I wouldn't know where to begin. OpenSource software is what allowed me to build my business and thus work from home instead of a corporate office, be home when my kids get home from school everyday, take vacations when I want, and basically de-stress my entire life and probably saved me from a stress related heart attack in 20 years. ...And that wasn't one program, it was everything from the big ones like Apache and Linux down through to the rinky dink little industry specific one-up tools I've used here and there to make life easier.
So - a bit OT, but a good time to thank *everyone* who's pumping out OS software, including those that do the tiny unseen stuff. You don't know me, I don't know you and we'll never meet. But the total OS effect that you're a part of has drastically and directly improved my life. And I'm not alone by any stretch.
(By contrast, MS hasn't done anything for me though I'm hoping for a check in the mail).
some dude named Cowboy Neal. i see his name on /. polls all the time. i assume he's some kind of open source freak/hero.
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
Author of ...
a k a Zlib
"A Massively Spiffy Yet Delicately Unobtrusive Compression Library (Also Free, Not to Mention Unencumbered by Patents)"
You're thinking of Linus Van Pelt from Peanuts.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Without them, the coders might have to go and find relationships that last more than 15 minutes, and the code output would suffer.
This guy is great! He's the main responsible for our new federal free software policy. He's really fighting hard for it and even Microsoft once tried to sue him about one interview when he said that they use a drug dealer method of business "the first one is free..."
Scientia est Potentia
For making Firestarter. I personally cannot tell you how much time and energy that little program helped me out. Especially since I was a Linux newbie at the time.
I posted a quaestion to the vim.org list and nobody answered: How do you get cppcomplete to work? It sounds like exactly what I want and I've never gotten a "match", even if I built the tags myself.
Also, I buckled and activated the menu bar just for tagmenu.vim. It just seems more convenient for me than taglist.vim (which I still have ready for console use). I just wish tagmenu.vim didn't have two levels of menus to get the functions (vs. just dump them on the first level like VisualAssist).
... for both CUPS and HTMLDOC.
He is writing/upkeeping the BTTV driver for linux that makes me able to use TVtime and (try) to use freevo on my linux box. He also has helped play a role in the success of the company I work for as his BTTV driver has helped fix a lot of issues with out TV/FM tuner cards.
Thanks Gerd! (http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/bttv.html) for anyone interested in the driver
How about the folks who made it possible for cheap bastards like me to install NetBSD on ancient hardware (in my case, Mac 68k -- you know, the pre-Power-Mac stuff)? And to keep maintaining code for an obsolete architecture? For that, I owe some serious snaps and props to the NetBSD/Mac68k gang -- Alan Briggs, Bruce O'Neel, Hauke Fath, Frederick Bruckman, John Klos, Michael Zucca, Riccardo Mottola, Shigeki Uno, Julio Vidal, Tim Larson, and anyone who I might have missed. I owe those guys some serious beers!
Even superheroes once were losers
Another Linux gaming hero (though not as unsung as Lantinga, even if his Linux accomplishments are less well known) is John Carmack. Carmack:
* Promoted use of OpenGL over DirectX, stopping an important Microsoft lock-in tool.
* Created a series of (good) cross-platform games to encourage vendors to support Linux with 3d hardware -- probably at loss to his company.
* Wrote code for 3d drivers in the GLX era (pre-DRI) to help bootstrap the 3d world on Linux.
* Created a series of cross-platform engines that could be used to make cross-platform games.
* Open-sourced his older cross-platform game code to encourage production of games based on this code.
May we never see th
Bow and grovel before Steve !!!
beg for mercy!
For those who haven't tried it, the fedora-list (http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-lis t) is a fantastic list, full of incredibly helpful, incredibly knowledgeable people. Alexander Dalloz stands out, but the whole list is fantastic. I learn something new every time I sit down to catch up with the messages.
Disclosure: I had the pleasure of contributing a few modest lines of code to Tortoise, but believe me, it was way cool long before my meager changes made their way in.
"I call a baby goat a 'goatse.'" -- my non-Internet-savvy 6-year-old stepdaughter
I would have to say Pamela Jones of Groklaw who has done a lot to uphold the values and spirit of free software through valuable legal research.
Closer to home, Gonzalo Porcel, one of the founders of the Miami Linux Users Group has done more to spread the use of Free Softaware locally than anybody I know. Not only does he help with technical issues in our monthly meetings and through the forum, he has led a number of very successful projects to set up community computer labs running Linux.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
The unsung heros of comp.text.tex include donald arsenau, david kastrup, and that English guy with the BBC fetish. They have been answering my questions for 10 years.
Here: CVSROOT/avail
S
story here, and the actual files in ogg and mp3 formats.
Tirelessly guiding, driving and pulling the european anti-software patent movement.
Without Hartmut Pilch the EU would have legalized software patents by now. Just think what that would do to Free Software...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Now that you mention JPL/NASA -- Donald Becker.
Donald Becker started working on clustering Linux machines. He was one of the original founders of Beowulf, without which Slashdot would lose a lot of its culture. He is also responsible for a huge number of the Linux Ethernet drivers. A major reason that Linux is such a solid server OS is because of his work.
May we never see th
So you're the guy that keeps stalking him. Thanks for not posting anonymously.
Weirdo.
The people at irc.freenode.net #mplayer for helping me play CSSed DVDs.
Ozkan and Khaled for working on a flash development environment for linux (F4L)
Simon's Rock College
You'd be surprised at the amount of people who are involved with development, but you never hear about, or have their names in the documentation.
The SOSDG doesn't have any full coding projects of its own, however we do our own ports of applications to Windows, and provide hosting, programmers, and management support to dozens of projects.
Sometimes, its the little things that matter - the beta testing, the packaging, etc. I personally, while not a programmer anymore, do project management and beta testing on things. I find bugs, make sure that people have the server power they need for development, stuff like that.
Even the smallest thing in Open Source development can be rewarding.
Brielle
Xavier Leroy for the OCAML system and the Linux's Posix Threads.
:).
Suerte
I certainly don't claim to be an unsung hero, but I am a bit disappointed at how little attention my GVI (Graphical Voter Interface) has received. Check it out. I think you will like it.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
ado has been the maintainer of the time zone data base ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ for years, almost certainly largely a thankless task. How else would we know what time it is? He also contributed to grep. He is also a genuinely good and modest person.
The Slashdoeters built a worship thread then,
in ten days, high and broad
on the Apache server, a beacon
for ye search bots
widely seen by web surfers.
They surrounded the server
by a fire wall, as splendid
as the cleverest
hax0r could make.
In ye pr0n/ directory they placed
PNGs and JPEGs
and all such things as
they'd found on their HDDs.
They left that precious traesure
in a forbidden-access directory,
as it lies still,
as useless to men
as it had been before.
Then twelve Moderators
rode round the thread
moding up those
posting praises
for their Hero's
hackish deeds.
(A geek should do so
when his Dude gets fragged.)
Thus ye Slashdoeters
mourned their great Developer,
saying he was,
among this world's Coders,
ye hax0rest, ye nerdest,
ye dudest to his people,
and the most eager
for eternal MOD-PARENT-UP's.
-- Gall Anonimus
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
Of course his package builds on Linux and quite an extensive list of libraries, but the MythTV package is capable of many incredible features that rivals Tivo and other commerical PVR's, and at least on my setup, is rock-solid. Good job! -Mike
Without the bash shell, Linus wouldn't have had anything to boot up to :-)
Brian Fox was the original author.
I nominate M.J. Ray, recently defunct Debian-legal member, who zealously protected Debian from evil licenses. May he rest in peace.
He is a hero of the Open Source GIS software.
;)
He maintains the Tiff and GeoTiff libraries, Proj, OpenEV, and probably more
He is also the main author of the amazing GDAL/OGR suite.
Great stuff and great support.
Thanks!
formerly of rutgers university. he ported linux to sparc way back in 1996 and helped me get it running on my old sparcstation LX. i think he was working on SGI ports back then too!
MJ Ray is one unsung hero from Debian. Tragically, he is no longer among the living.
Since I strongly doubt there are many people in here who are using any of the software packages I have wrote, I am going to toot my own horn here. Don't like it - sorry about that!
Granted, I am what you would call a niche developer. The software packages that I have wrote mostly deal with communicating with Allen Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers like the ControlLogix and the PLC-5. I prefer to look at it this way: if you have bought powdered baby formula, wondered about the safety of the Air Force's Airborne Laser program, or bought a set of tires for your car, my software helped bring those products about.
Now if only I could get some help with the tape backup software I am writing...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Funny no one mentioned djb or vietse or my current favourite ethan galstad of nagios / netsaint fame..
- dhawal
I'm gonna have to throw in my $.02 for Everaldo Coelho. I mean, who out there isn't using Crystal icons?
And, of course, everybody else at KDELook.org (yes, and Gnomelook.org)!
Probably some of those on the top of my list are;
Pat Volkerding (of Slackware)
Todd Kulesza (of Dropline Gnome, for Slackware).
Ryan "Icclus" Gordon, for all of his work on games (even though they are commercial games)
Michael Simms for publishing said commercial games for my open source platform of choice.
Oh, and Manuel Jander for hacking shit shit out of the Aureal Vortex (even though I'm not using it anymore, his work just really impresses me).
I wish I could personally thank everyone that contributes to the kernel, or my favorite programs that I use each day (Epiphany, Mozilla, Gnome, Evolution, X-Chat, etc.), but unfortuantely - such is the nature of software.
I don't really think that it is any different than proprietary software though. Sure, people get paid with closed-source (and open, for that matter), but that's about all they get in return. With Free/OSS software, we all get great software in return. So, the hard work ends up paying off in some form or fashion. I don't code by trade, but I devote time in forums to helping others and try to help test and patch things. It all counts in the end.
For putting up with the fucked up shitty text installs of the early versions of Linux I looked at without hurling my 486 out the window.
I nominate the users! Without them, OSS would be nothing. They (we) have had to tramp through jungles of man pages, frozen tundra of bugs, the lack-of-support desert, and climb huge learning curves.
Hats off to OSS users and promoters!
Hello# Staff- Members
the People here
http://www.mozilla.org/about/stafflist.html
And Ben Goodger for some reason he is not listed here, Although their decision regarding removal of some stuff (css alt) is questionable to say the least, their contributions have made it possible for me to surf the web, without having the urge to throw the computer out the window. And lets not forget the developers of the Adblock extension:
# Henrik Aasted
# Wladimir Palant
# rue
# Stefan Kinitz
# Aaron Spuler
Who allow me to surf the web without throwing up.
There are too many other people to mention and not enough space (example: Torisugari etc.) For their hard work in the ff project and extensions.
For Sendmail
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
I have contributed hundreds of thousands of lines to open source software, including x.org, glibc, the linux kernel, as well as doing tons to promote Linux usage in the UK. In fact, in the last two years I've gotten Linux onto around 200,000 computers across the country through my advocacy and consultancy. Just because I'm not mentioned in every other slashdot thread doesn't mean I'm not doing anything! Can't I get some recognition for my hard work please?
OK, I sound like I'm ranting, but I see a lot of people contributing in a lot of ways. There's some great developers, there's institutions donating cash, artists making cool things like the Firefox logo. I know there are guys like Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, Bram Cohen and others. It's also however about the Pierres, Pablos and Pauls who are writing little bits of documentation, answering pretty basic questions on forums, telling their boss to try out Linux or passing Mozilla CDs around.
Definitely Steve Streeting of the OGRE.3D engine. He has an amazing dedication for the project and the engine bypasses many commercial engines out there with clean marks.
Founder of FreeGeek. This growing organization in Porland Ore. recycles old computer equipment and installs OSS, and puts it in the hands of people who might not have the money for a computer or the motivation or skills to get into Linux or Open Source otherwise. FreeGeek has grown tremendously in the last few years and is getting national and maybe international attention.
Pete Forsyth
Without media player classic picking up where microsoft left off, I would be using crappy media players to watch movies.
Mesa and much more. He is great!
Because they continue to improve the software and even port it to new devices, long after the original Zaurus 5500 hit its EOL.
Not even giving up in times when fewer and fewer devs contribute to the projects.
They made the Zauri to the killer machines they are today.
Way to go guys!
He is a great project leader and always dedicated with an open ear to the Dropline Community. He did such a great job in building Dropline-Gnome and serves the whole Slackware Community with the great and active forums, and he is still in his early 20s.
Actually I believe that even if a deveolper or maintainer isn't famous in the sense that his name is known throughout the whole OSS-Community there is still the close community around his project and they know very well if the person is a "hero" or an asshole. In the case of the swaret project this seems to have backfired on the developers, despite having a good "product".
The Ramones. They're not programmers; they might not even know how to use a computer but they created the "Do It Yourself" mentality that is the driving force of free software.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen
Bet you don't know what they did. They wanted good software for producing high quality music notation layouts. So they wrote it. And, thankfully, they made it free software to share with the world, so the next person who wanted good software for producing high quality music notation layouts could use what they had and improve on it instead of starting over.
The result is GNU Lilypond. Currently it performs better than proprietary alternatives like Finale, but the interface is still text-based. But musicians tend to feel it does a superior layout job.
If the guy who I had an email conversation with awhile back manages to get the Aiken 7-shape shaped note system implemented for Lilypond, I'll sing his name, too.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Designed and developed lout. Saved me from LaTeX hell.
Thanks, that means a lot coming from someone of absolutely zero importance.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't need to explain why to those familiar with LaMont.
http://www.mmjgroup.com/
Thanks for making the Closed Source guys look worse!
Kudos to Matz for creating Ruby, a very powerful, fully object oriented scripting languaje.
-P@
I think it is the developers of the little known OSS projects that are still being worked on simply due to the love they have for their projects that are the true unsung heroes of OSS.
Contrary to what some believe about innovation within OSS, innovation does happen. The problem is that innovative and unique projects within the OSS arena get little to no fanfare, and are thusly ignored. When an OSS project develops functionality similar in nature to a closed, proprietary software package, it may well receive much attention and fanfare because people are familiar with the functionality, and with the OSS project, they are given an alternative. With something new, there is no marketing money behind it, and so no one knows about it, and no one is looking for it.
For example, FrogJam was developed completely independantly, and from what I know, the original developer, plat, had no knowledge of anything even remotely similar to it when he conceived of the idea. He continues to work on it to this day for the love of it, even though he's the only person really working on it (despite what the developer's page says.)
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
because i'm selfish
Raymond "Real Hacker" Toy; Where would CMUCL be without you?
Others notable hackers.
Bill Newman
Christopher Rhodes
Brian Rice*
Daniel Barlow
Mike MacDonald
Bruno Haibel, Sam Steigold, Michael Stoll
--
* For comic relief.
Qmail.. djbdns... daemontools... ucspi-tcp... all good, quality--and at the risk of jinxing it--secure software.
http://cr.yp.to/
How about Tom Lane? He's third as most prolific open source copyright holder behind "The Regents of the University of California" and "The Free Software Foundation".
without which.. we would not have a TON of great MUDS.
Mudding being a huge staple of Internet life in college time back when all us Open Source people were getting started.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
So, put your goofiest team headshots in there, bio, paypal links, blinken lights, ... whatever. That's the easiest way to get more credit where credit is due, if that's what you're after. As opposed to "Written by Joe Schmoe in 1999. Humble pie documentation by John Smith.".
Also, on app startup, it's wouldn't be such a bad idea to display an about-random-developer splash page for a couple seconds. If people REALLY don't care, they can just disable the splash as you can in most apps.
Obviously, this works best in client apps moreso than background daemons and such.
--
Power to the Peaceful
just to see if anyone will fifth.
If you use Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, or TCL chances are you use a multitude of libraries that would've been prohibitively laborious to wrap without SWIG.
Erlang.org: wow
I nominate Jim McQuillan of the LTSP Project because this project gives the ability to run Linux on cheap hardware.
This provides a great solution for developing countries and underprivileged schools a chance to compete and contribute.
As you can see on the site, he handles the PR side of open source very well, and he still hangs around in the IRC channel and is very friendly and helpful.
The earliest item I ever saw that made an explicit call for open source software and against software as proprietary / for-profit / trade secret / etc. was a letter from Bernie Galler. It's in the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful" letter which started the whole structured programming flap.
In it, Bernie noted that the authors of some particular set of subroutines were, though distributing them, charging a round-number price significantly higher than the cost of making and shipping a copy of the card deck. From this he predicted the potential for the rise of software-as-product, the demise of the then-current free exchange and reuse of software (in both the academic and commercial community), vast duplication of effort, increases of software costs, proprietary claims, etc. And he argued against the adoption of that model as being a far greater loss than gain.
Bernie's own contributions to open software (in that era BEFORE closed software and afterward), personal, organizational, and educational, are far to numerous to go into here. But IMHO he's the very first spokesman to explicitly, in a widely-read public forum, argue for free software (as in both speech AND beer).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As an example, one area that I have been involved with is flash file system storage. Flash file systems underpin a slew of embedded and mobile applications (PDAs, phones, television sets,....). A reliable flash file system is a very valuable chunk of code that is invisible to most people using it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Tom Lane, one of the core developers of PostgreSQL RDBMS, is an amazing developer.
He cranks out new features, fixes difficult bugs, helps the release process, and answers questions to newbies and developers alike.
He can break down a tough problem in no time and give the real answer clearly. He knows when a feature is just the latest DB buzzword and won't be a net win. He'll explain for the 1000th time why PostgreSQL is not using an index on someone's 12-record test data, or autogenerated test data where 90% of the records match.
He is a brilliant developer and has taught me a lot about practical database development.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
The late FreeBSD ports maintainer deserves credit, so I thought I'd mention him here.
They are both unsung, and many are certainly grateful for their contribution.
In early 1999 they wrote several articles and started a petition for releasing Macos X as open source. Their original goal was two-fold. They wanted Apple to release the core OS as open source, and for apple to continue selling and supporting "Yellow Box" development tools on Intel platforms. Apple did not continue supporting their development tools on either Windows (or on what was then Rhapsody for Intel). However, Apple subsequently released Darwin, and a number of other software projects, under an open source license.
Apple's increasing use of numerous BSD and GPL licensed code has resulted in a steady stream of patches both from Apple itself and from Apple users which are fed back upstream to the original projects. Projects ranging from OSes, utilities, compilers, and applications, benefit directly from these contributions.
Apple developers, OpenDarwin developers, and users of Macos X and darwin, have contributed improvements to FreeBSD, samba, Konquerer/KHTML, procmail, gcc, and many other projects. These contributions cross OS and license boundaries, benefiting linux users, BSD users, and users of open source tools on other commercial OSes.
Though Don Yacktman and Patrick Taylor were not directly affiliated with Apple, I am sure their voices and the voices of those whom they inspired, influenced Apple's decision. Don's prior work on projects like MiscKit, provided great value to NeXTStep and OPENSTEP developers. However, I believe that the petition for opening Macos X has done far more.
These names are probably unknown to most slashdot readers. A large percentage of users of open source OSes and tools have probably benefited indirectly from Apple's choice to release Darwin. These men helped influence that decision if not inspire it.
Unsung hero seems an apt description.
Donno where I'd be with good ol' "nc".
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Xavier Leroy, For OCaml system and Linux's Posix Threads.
Andrew Tridgell because rsync 0wnz0rs! Then there's that little "Samba" thing, and ccache.
- RustyTaco
Not that I object to the nomination of Russ, who's done a lot more than that, but his contributions to a support list for a decidedly NOT open source MTA is hardly a good justification for calling him an unsung hero of open source!
:)
If we were limited to picking just one unsung hero, I'd probably vote for Roland McGrath over Russ, but since nobody said I had to vote for just one, I'll happily give Russ a vote too.
Looking for more about Bernie I happened to notice that he's the current president of the Software Patent Institute.
The SPI (which has both pro- and anti- software patent members) is attempting to solve the bogus software patent problem by making available a searchable database of software prior art.
This database, incidentally, is also a useful for anybody who wants to avoid having to reinvent a software wheel and to keep software breakthroughs from getting lost.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I may be prejudiced, because I've known Roland since, well, since the day he was born. But on the other hand, I can say that about a lot of people, but none of the others have their names on so much of the software I use daily. In fact, very few people as unknown as Roland have their names on so much of the software I use daily. :)
While RMS has been the very-visible leader and statesman of the FSF and the GNU Project, Roland has quietly been one of their most prolific coders and best project leaders. Very good nomination, IMO.
I agree with you, I don't think it's flamebait, it's just slightly offtopic.
I believe that developers of free software (software libre) do deserve more respect than the ones that don't, from an ethical standpoint.
Proprietary software has restrictions that many of us (sadly not _that_ many) feel should not exist.
Software is one of the most important tools for any field, and restricting, or working for those who restrict the use of software, is not something admirable _ethically_.
That, plus I believe ethics is more important that technical capabilities. So, there you have, at least someone believes the guy who wrote mIRC _is_ less worthy of respect for that fact than the one who maintains or supports free (GPL, BSD..) software.
I am the unsung hero of open source. Sitting right here at my desk in front of my computer reading slashdot.
Would you like to ask something?
or wait...
Lots of people already mentioned, but also one that doesn't seem to have been...
:)
Simon Tatham, author of PuTTY. Which probably qualifies as one of the most commonly used pieces of free software on Windows. He also wrote almost all of NASM (to which I contributed a little), and I've seen his name in the Linux kernel too (to be precise, it was in the VGA console driver code).
If you're ever in Coventry again, I'll buy you a drink.
stands to loose something by advocating it, and advocates it anyways.
The teacher who pushes for an open source 'office' suite. The admin who pusshes to get Linux into the a server room in a MS shop.
The government person who installed linux instead of MS.
It's one thing to run something becasue you believe in it, it's another to believe in it enough to risk your job and/or reputation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm biased, but I think everyone at Free Geek has done a very good job at bringing Linux and Free Software to the masses, at least those of the masses living in the Portland area.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
and he uses vi.
...when they judge people on their choice of editor.
Who since Jan 1999 has produced a weekly summary of the discussions on the linux-kernel mailing list. Thank you Zack!
Gvim is a great little program, even if I haven't got around to setting it as my default editor at work (Visual Studio 7)
Emerald Astrology
Original author of Window Maker, as well as the rest of the Window Maker developers. I haven't followed the development in recent years, but I've been using it since the original "stable" release, 0.6.3, or around 8 years ago.
:D.
I'm even running it under cygwin on Windows
Eben Moglen co-wrote the GPL and is probono counsel to the Free Software Foundation.
What makes free software free is how its creators choose to share it with the rest of the world. That's a social agreement. The GPL codifies that contract and it's held up admirably all this time.
When people say the GPL hasn't been challenged it's a good thing. It means the GPL was written well.
Jeff is of Kermit, Kerberos, OpenAFS fame. I have been trundling along with Kerberos and OpenAFS. He has been ever helpful.
And oh yeah, he writes the code too.
cURL, not to be confused with the abortion that was (is?) proprietary and expensive and therefore doomed Curl (sorry, Tim, I guess everyone can have a bad idea once), is fantastic. Used to be I hated that my RedHat boxes didn't have wget but rather curl. I was familiar with wget. However, curl is great for automation (file upload posts, for example) and seems to be much more rounded out than any other CLI utility I've used. For pure programability I personally like Perl module LWP and its cousins, but for shell scripts, cron jobs, one-liners curl is King.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The late Mike Watts, a moderator at JustLinux.com. He helped literally thousands of people get started in the world of Linux before he finally passed away.
:(
You will be missed mdwatts.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Bryce Harrington of the Inkscape team is definetly number one in my book. He displays amazing skill at both improving and managing the development of inkscape. And the Inkscape team, Open Clipart Library and many other projects would be lost without him. Also Mentalguy and Bulia from the Inkscape team are both dedicated, talented and definitely heros of opensource
- Andy Fitzsimon
There are a bunch of competitors to the CVS throne. Prominent names that come to mind:
- subversion
- Gnu Arch
- Vesta
There's also the now venerable but proprietary perforce, and the proprietary bitkeeper (which is gratis, but only under some circumstances).I've submitted a lot of bug reports and patches to various software projects -- but typically only the 1 or 2 fixes that I need to get it working for me. So I have a not-too-deep but very broad interaction with a lot of different GPL & BSD projects. In fact, I've even submitted patches to projects with closed-source (like faqts -- gave them patches to better rank members and score answers... but they never made any improvement using my code or anyone else's). In fact, the faqts site is par-for-the-course. Most projects don't seem to respond.
So I would nominate the gentleman behind HT Track. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. They're responsive and accept code, even cleaning up my poorly done offerings. I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and I'd feel even happier if they were sung heroes.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Try BSD!
It was his project to improve some ancient Sys-III code.
Later other grads came to work on it and it forked into BSD Unix.
SysV and many things in all unixies originated under BSD. Sure Bell Labs changed it and made it incompatible but it certainly influenced it.
Oh and BSD Unix 4.2 gave rise to TCP/IP and was the first OS out of the box that came networked by default.
Thank you Bill. You have certainly changed the computing landscape alot.
http://saveie6.com/
On word: OpenSSH.
He did not write it alone, one must not forget the work of Tatu Ylonen but singlehandledly wrote the SSH2 support integrated in the same daemon (ssh.com one forks a different daemon based on the protocol) in a very short time, making it the best SSH implementation around.
...for giving people a target for their frustration.
People can vent their frustration by flaming poor ol' michael then return to coding in a better, self-righteous mood.
What a martyr, rolling with the punches for the Greater Good(tm). I mean... err... fuck you Michael!
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
If you like doing open source, then do it. Don't whine about not being thanked. If you want to be thanked for it, put it in the license that people have to thank you.
It's not charity if you want something back.
Ton Roosendaal of Blender
and
Jorrit Tyberghein of Crystal Space
He's the guy that converted my high-school to Open-source. And I don't mean only part of it. The whole campus is running open-source. Everyone knows has to learn how to use openoffice, icewm and shared folders as well as email to submit homework to teachers. He's the one who basically showed the efficiency of the LTSP project (here) in a private medium size organization. His actions have made it possible to have only 3 people in the IT department for the service of 250 people altogether. He's also the one who taught linux classes and helped me follow through my independent study of computer graphics. Derek is my hero, and I hope sometime he'll read this.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Go and grep through a some man-pages and see who keeps popping up: David MacKenzie I think this is his homepage: http://www.djmnet.org/ Thanks David!
Daniel Horn, creator of Vegastrike, gave the world a brilliant open source game, and introduced me to open source softwar and linux, without which i'd still be running a windows machine.
I don't know if Vesta is much of a contender. It looks like it's hard to adopt for projects that are not totally prepared to buy into its way of doing everything.
A more interesting new open project is Darcs: much simpler than BitKeeper or Arch, but nearly as powerful (at least for small-medium projects.)
Sarathy was the force behind making Perl work well on Windows.
r .p lex#gurusamy
Anyone using Perl on Windows can attest to its seamless integration.
Thanks man!
http://www.ActiveState.com/Company/people_senio
Blender was GPLed and now kicking.
Interesting! I've been using a hidden (Javascript-calling and DOM-manipulating) Java applet to make my browser-based user interfaces work like normal applications, but Openthought has done this using pure Javascript in a hidden frame: fake a form submission to send data from the browser to the server-side code; use Javascript in the page returned by the form submission to update the browser display.
The advantange of this is that the UI can be on a separate computer from the application logic. A current disadvantage is that the application must be written in Perl.
Can Openthought handle asynchronous updates of the UI by the server? That is, in response to some external event or timeout, rather than triggered directly by the user manipulating the UI?
This line (-- "The man who sold his soul to code so much so quickly."--) on
tryand
The original question suggested mentioning people in your own company who push to open source a project against all opposition. Andrew is passionately devoted to open source, and without him the Kowari RDF database would never have been released, or become the project that it is.
Lots of us write open source code, but it takes people who'll lay it on the line like Andrew did to make a real difference.
He is building the adm8211 driver for wifi, and represents the FOSS developer that sees a problem and builds a solution. Yes, I am using that driver to make this comment.
Michael, this buds for you.
Hes my teacher at university.
Hes devoted to open source and a great person also.
I really admire open source people for their contribution to society.
UM - MENDOZA - ARGENTINA
A decent list of unsung heros would be thousands of people long and still miss contributors that play(ed) very important roles in all of the open source software we use today.
I don't know nearly as many people as I should and I certainly haven't done enough to thank or otherwise praise many of the open source contributors who have been giving to projects, large and small, that I use every day. This topic has prompted me to start looking a little bit closer.
There is one person I do know who has had a huge impact on the entire open source world as well as my open source continent (Mozilla) that doesn't get the recognition she deserves.
Michell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation is definitely a hero. The author of the MPL and the Chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla project, she has been a driving force behind the Mozilla projects since the beginning. Without Mitchell, Mozilla just wouldn't be where it is today.
--Asa
His column in Linux Journal is "Linux for Suits". Doc is the guy who's giving talks and making the pitch to the decisionmakers in the boardrooms. They even listen some! That is where the battle will be won.
Read some of his work, he can really get the message across. In 4 years of receiving the magazine I have never read him pushing one distro over another, he seems to want them all to win. He also give insight in what changes are needed to gain greater acceptance in the business world.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Henry Spencer
Chris Torek
Steve Summit
"He's no fun -- he fell right over."
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Ok, no fair! Anyone besides Alan Cox.
Robin Dunn, head of wxpython
Neil Hodgson, head of Scintilla/SciTE project
and
Bram Cohen creator of the BitTorent
JFS? That baby is rock solid, my power goes out and my jfs partitions come right back up - thanks unnamed IBM monkeys!
in the spirit of open source, I'm setting up my own awards ceremony.
Who wants to suck up to me ?
Author of vim. When you spend some time figuring out a program to the bottom you tend to know who the author is.
Some other people too, but I cannot remember their names since they are Slavic and unpronouncable.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
The founders of Cygnus Support, later Cygnus Solutions, later a part of Red Hat, for showing, in 1989, that you really could create a business on free software: David Henkel-Wallace, Michael Tiemann, John Gilmore.
An IBM research fellow. Nice guy.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
There's a piece of software that many of us geeks can't live without. And while you hard core geeks might be thinking "That Jabber Author Guy" .. but most people I know, including myself, uses Gaim on Linux. Heck, there are many AIM clients even for Mac OS X that use the gaim core (ie. Adium and Fire) ... and a bunch of others even on other platforms.
While GAIM is radically different from when he passed on development to the community, let's not forget Mark Spencer for having brought us the original gaim, which evolved into the product that most of us use.
(Let's not also forget the current maintainers at: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/contactinfo.php )
He writes the software: for example, the C++ parser in gcc.
He manages the software: he's release manager for gcc. This is a huge and complicated job.
And he founded a small business, CodeSourcery, which employs 8 people and works mostly on free software (FSF toolchain and others). Mark's business savvy means that besides Mark, seven other engineers devote most of their professional time to free software development.
Plus, I will say from personal experience that Mark is a nice guy and easy to talk to.
Hmmm... What about this Cowboy Neal guy ? Why doesn't anyone mention his name ? Is the meme dead already ?
Supposedly he lives near me someplace.
Thank you Ant guy for making my life so much better and so much more miserable!!!
If you click on the link with JavaScript enabled, a copy of the contents of your clipboard will be sent to cshacks.partycat.us.
How about some of the victims of lawsuits against Open Source packages/programs and some of the professors and others who have fought for the legal rights of Open Source. The people who decide to fight against the DMCA rather than fold up their tents and go away under threat of lawsuits.
Well as it's said on the hurd-devel page:
p ://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/i sts.gnu.org/archive/html/help-hurd/. debian.org/debian-hurd/
To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the Hurd-devel-readers Archives. (The current archive is only available to the list members.)
I guess that's why you don't see anything after april here.
But the Hurd is definitely alive. See:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/l4-hurd/
htt
http://l
http://lists
An organization making extensive use of copyright communist?
I am sure you know in communist regimes there is not such a thing as copytight since anything produced belongs to the state.
You could not be more off the make, even if you intended the above as a joke.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
* my grandmother, keeping me mentally and financially up a bit
* the following OpenBSD developers, who helped me a lot:
Todd Fries
Dale Rahn
Ted Unangst
partially Henning Brauer
* the company who now is known as SCOX, but released
ancient UNIX(R) and BSD under a 4-clause UCB-style
BSD licence in 2002: Caldera
(they also released DOS...)
* not exactly open source, but nice too:
http://museum.borland.com/
* of course, everyone who has directly contributed
to MirOS (the operating system I develop),
including a fascinating team of developers.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Linux is the kernel. Now what can you do with only that?
All the traditional UNIX like OS utilities are GNU software, which is the foundation for any other application.
The utilities and the kernel (which is wah you traditionally receive in any distribution) should, righty, be called GNU/Linux.
I wish we don't have to "go again" through this, but misinformed people spread like a pest og Biblical proportions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
X-Free has gotten rarkably little praise, compared to (for example) the Linux kernel while both are very complex projects, have the same importance and have been around for just as long. Although the number of contributors to X-Free is probably a lot smaller.
So here's a BIG THANK YOU to the guys who made X-Free!
Matt Simerson has an awesome Qmail Toaster script with all the extra fixins. Qmail is a bitch to wrap your brain around to begin with, but his Perl scripts help you quickly and easily get a qmail/webmail system up and running.
http://www.tnpi.biz
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
.. has written a *lot* of incredibly good software however seems not to be known/credited.
*t
I'd have to nominate Kern for his spectacular Backup system (Bacula) which has saved me endless hours of work and the data of some of my computer illiterate friends/co-workers. (imagine the look on somebody's face when their 60GB HDD head-crashes)
Runners up would be Dan Langille (very active Bacula developer), Nicolas Boichat (for the wx-windows gui) and José Luis Tallón for the Debian packages.
They are willing to adopt dozens of non-standard GNU functions, but refuse to adopt the most basic security measures like strlcpy() because it was invented by OpenBSD. Every other OS, even Solaris has it. Gee, I wonder why Linux has so many security problems???
...the users ;-)
There are some open source projects out there that are absolutely amazing (Firefox for example) - but then there are those others out there when I wonder how a user ever made it through the installation, let alone some of the horrid interfaces and critical bugs. It is those persistent users out there who think nothing of tedious installs, manage to deal with some of the worst interfaces, and patiently, dutifully submitting every bug they run into. Volunteering their time and thoughts with only a vague promise of usable software in return.
They are the ones I'm amazed at. My hat's off to them.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Weitse Verma for making my life of sendmail hell go away (no offense EA), and tirelessly answering email on the postfix-users list.
The guys who wrote screen, which from what I can tell are:
1987 Oliver Laumann
1991 Wayne Davidson
1993 Juergen Weigert
1993 Michael Schroeder
and all the debian package maintainers that are making installing software so much easier.
Okay, okay, of course Jef Poskanzer should be nominated. He's written all sorts of cool software (including pbmplus, which I've used about every other day for the last twenty years or whatever), and has some really neato hacks on his web page, including ACME Mapper, which I also use every day.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You don't get to name other people projects, that is really the only relevant issue here.
Author of scsh[1].
His documentation is especially well written.
[1]
http://www.scsh.net
Who still remembers the good ol' Fish Disks (not CDs) for the Amiga?
He wrote the window manager I was always looking for: ion.
I now use it more than a year and I am very happy with it. If you prefer the keyboard to operate your computer, try out this fine wm, you might like it!
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
If you mean it LITERALLY : I have had many free meals, from milk at my mother's breast to church socials to political cook-outs to eating nature's bounty growing wild.
If you mean it FIGUREATIVELY, take a breath; you paid what for that oxygen?
Saying there is no free lunch is just a way of excusing greedy ungenerous behavior. Profit, in a well balanced life, has its place; as does generosity. It is not for nothing that Jesus told the rich to GIVE AWAY THEIR WEALTH and that a rich man going to heaven was like a camel going through the eye of a needle (can't be done). What's in your bank account could be saving babies (the innocent) lives? What are YOUR priorities?
Some programmer at some company somewhere (it was probably Microsoft) was introduced to somebody.
The programmer's reply to the somebody he was being introduced to: "Do I need to know you?"
Then, on a related note, Bill Gates was quoted as saying, essentially, "churchgoing (or attending any worship service) is a waste of time."
And don't forget Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer proclaiming "I...love...this...company! Yeeeessss!" at the end of the (in)famous 'monkeyboy' video clip.
In the end, it all ultimately boils down to this: