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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.
Thanks for making it necessary buddy!
All those random people that have single lines in software changelogs... Take this for example. There's a project that helped get support for a popular USB camera out into the wild.
;-) I hear he's really sexy too!
Look all the way at the bottom. There's one guy there that did a TON for the community
"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.
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?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
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
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!
Papa John, Dominoes, Pizza Hut, and the #1 Super China Buffet delivery guy! They make it possible. As well as Corona. but i digress.
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
I hesitated for about two seconds before nominating myself. I mean, if I don't believe in myself, who else would, or should?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That incident has always symbolised the entire Open Source movement to me -- distributed thinking and determination coming up with a powerful solution, despite all the naysayers' opinions.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
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
Do you mean Ceren?
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Like it or not, RMS is a sung hero of OSS.
--
make install -not war
I have no idea what kind of software that 'Stallman' fellow has written, although I wish him luck -- maybe his project will catch on.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Hrvoje Niksic
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!
We basically have no heros in the sense of this article. Despite being one of the largest (quite possibly the largest) and most visible OSS comunities it's become something of a distinctive property of our community that we don't have someone that's out there making a lot of noise.
I'm not sure what really defines a hero; in fact most of our "heros" in the F/OSS community probably aren't those who have contributed the most. More often they're just the guys that are stark-raving-mad and don't want anyone to miss the circus.
Sourceforge bridged the gap between open source projects and the general public.
It gave coders the resources they needed to get multi-coder open-source projects to the public.
It gave the public the resources they needed to find the solutions they need and interact with the coders.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
When he lost his sight to diabetes, I acted as his caregiver and "seeing eye person." I helped him write software tools and subroutines for general use in Project Voyager. I watched him move bytes around absolute memory addresses in FORTRAN 77, although the language was supposed to prevent this. He was, as Jerry Pournelle once wrote, "the sane genius." He died in 1988, but he's still one of the greats in my book and in that of everybody who knew him.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Q: You do know what irony is don't you?
A: Well sure, it's like silvery or goldy but it's made out of iron.
*** rimshot ***
Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Tip your waitresses and bartenders - they're working hard for you!!
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
There is an ancient hindu tradition of creating anonymous works.
The authors (or the maintainors) never left their names in the body of literature or text. We can only guess at the people who created those ancient texts from other sources. The reasoning for doing that [i guess] was that, the work if it can, will survive because of its own ability and the fame for that work is same as fame for its author.
It is perhaps the same thing that prompts us to contribute to the OSS - so that we can feel that at least a part of our selves survive through them.
~561
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!
Because, after all, some of the code SCO wrote is in Linux. Now Darl, don't be modest, show us what you've contributed!
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.
Does somebody need a hug???? Come'er! We'll give you one, but it'll be sloppy, overwhelming, we'll argue the whole time we're giving it, and then we'll vanish.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
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.
Without that guy, and all the porn-meisters who followed him to cash in on geek sexual frustration, the internet would still be nothing more than a curiosity.
Thank god for porn!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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
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.
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!'
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.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Would you like the Ironic part??
Bill Gates encouraged MANY MANY people to flock to open source from almost day one. His "Basic" for the altair, even before he released his very first commercial program, his attitude towards users and others was so awful that many people hated him from day one. He sent a foaming at the mouth rant as an open Letter to all
I remember sending him a letter at the ripe old age of 10 asking about when BASIC was going to be released so I could play with it on my dad's computer at work.
I was Flamed hard in a rude reply about how software Thieves were delaying it and as a child it was beyond my capabilities anyways... I wish I still had the letter and I remember how it solidified in me a dis-taste for commercial software. I was writing assembly for my Commodore KIM-1 single board computer at that time and was excited with the idea of being able to easily program a real powerhouse computer.
Bill gates has been driving people to Open source ever cince he started in the business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Without the bash shell, Linus wouldn't have had anything to boot up to :-)
Brian Fox was the original author.
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.
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
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.
At least that's what my BSD book says. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Random is the New Order.
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.
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