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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?"
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
Hrvoje Niksic
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!
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
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.
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
My mum knows who Linus Torvalds is. OTOH she and a lot of open source people don't know much about Ulrich Drepper without whose tireless work we'd not have all the C library support and standards compliance we do
But there are zillions of open source people who really matter, often in non-obvious ways. People like Bill Hanneman whose code few people use and everyone else hopes never to need to use, but whose code gets us into goverment and helps its users in important ways. The answer to that riddle btw is that he writes accessibility software so the disabled can use the Linux desktops.
A free software role call would be a truely gigantic document and its precisely this that makes it work. Not just the big names but the tens of thousands of people who contributed an hour once to report and fix a bug.