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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?"
"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.
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!
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
> I hesitated for about two seconds
> before nominating myself.
I second this nomination - Russ helps lots of people out on the QMail mailing lists. Props!
The Army reading list
Hrvoje Niksic
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!
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.
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
Yes, one of RMS's weaker moments, but if it wasn't for RMS and GCC, I doubt any of us would have any free software at all.
RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.
We all owe the man one hell of a lot.
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.
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).
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
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
Let's not forget Donald Knuth for TeX which powers it all, and Leslie Lamport for the LaTeX macros. And of course, Bram Moolenaar for my preferred authoring environment.
:)
Also cheers to the folks behind EMBOSS and those behind the R project. Wayne Rasband for ImageJ, and all responsible for SciLab. Thanks to everyone for making science (more) fun.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
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.
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i think folks that write documentation for open source projects are often unsung. think of all of the documentation that exists for projects like linux, apache, perl, etc. these projects wouldn't be nearly as useful if there wasn't good documentation for them.
:)
documentation is one of those non-sexy aspects of open source that is often the hardest part to find someone to get it done, and even harder to get done in a way normal folks can understand. tech oriented folks, like programmers, often have a hard time communicating complex ideas to non-tech folks in a usable form.
fortunately, i know my work was well appreciated and helped lots of folks out with questions via the faq (i wrote lots of the documentation for the earlier versions of popfile). sadly, i lack the free time these days to continue working on the popfile project, but i'm proud to see lots of my work on the faq living on in the wiki and extended by others. btw, there's a new release of popfile today, thanks john & team!
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
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"
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
The testers and code auditors and everyone else who does the un-fun work that doesn't add features but instead makes sure that the code works for other people and that it stays in that condition. And I think the packagers, the ones who write the installation scripts and generally make software easy to use and easy to install also deserve a lot of credit.
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.
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.