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?"

Comments

Some people may not like this selection...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Donald Becker

[nhtshot]

cd /usr/src/linux
cat $(find ./) |grep Donald Becker

or even
dmesg |grep Donald Becker

Just in /drivers there are 232 comments with his name.

I vote for Bill Joy

[callipygian-showsyst]

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!

Notably absent from the discussion so far

[doublegauss]

Don Knuth Apart from nurturing countless computer scientists with The Art of Computer Programming, he donated TeX to the world, which would be enough by itself to grant the man perennial kudos.

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).

Henry Spencer

[doom]

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.

Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them

[zonker]

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! :)