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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.
We're using Eric's Openthought software at work. It's great and saves $$$.
...who did a lot of gratis work on Usenet long before most people could even spell I-n-t-e-r-n-e-t.
Why the Samba Team of course. Where would we be without it?
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Primary author of the GNU libc, co-author of GNU make...also of Hurd (for what its worth).
Also a very cool, unassuming guy.
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
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All the more kudos go to these guys since CVS is slowly being superceded by Subversion; Derek, Larry, and Mark are essentially doing the thankless job of legacy tech support.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
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.
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.
Thanks, great bit of history. Makes us all humble really, doesn't it?
A google reveals this snippet too The Alderson Drive
umm ... no ...
Atleast according to this book, it was a printer by Xerox, that ultimately led RMS to *start* the F/OSS movement
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.
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
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!'
At the risk of getting flamed.. How about reading the GCC mailing list instead?
RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.
While RMS did code gcc in the beginning, I don't feel one should give RMS credit for what it is today.
The GCC that RMS developed was IMHO amateurish. It was primarily the work done by the people at Cygnus (now Red Hat) who turned GCC into the quality real-world compiler it is today.
Not to mention that RMS opposed this. He opposed including C++ support, and then opposed supporting it properly, causing the Cygnus ecgs fork.
(which is now gcc again, since everybody else finally overruled RMS)
As for Linux, RMS spent a good amount of time back then actively discouraging people from contributing to Linux.. talking about the vaporware Hurd would be so much better and how it was all wasted effort.
I'd agree we owe a lot to RMS, but not with respect to GCC and Linux. The positive contributions he's made with respect to those two have been cancelled out by his counter-productive dogmatism.
(Even today, it continues. Many, if not most, GCC developers currently want to re-write parts of the front-end in C++. There are good technical arguments for this, and it's been shown that some code can be simplified greatly that way.
While most of the GCC steering committe recently said, "OK, well if you can show there are benifits, we're open to the idea". Except RMS who was STRONGLY against the idea. Not for any ideological reason, but simply because RMS doesn't like C++.
That is simply just terrible leadership.
I appreciate the sentiment, but this has nothing to do with open source software. This is quoted from "An Open Letter To Hobbyists", something BG wrote to complain about the fact that people were pirating MS BASIC for the Altair back in 1976.
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.
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