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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.
...who did a lot of gratis work on Usenet long before most people could even spell I-n-t-e-r-n-e-t.
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
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.
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