Slashdot Mirror
Unsung Heroes of Open Source
Yosef writes "Jon Udell uses his experience from using and hacking the free software BitPim to say that developers of such less-known projects are the true heroes of open source: 'For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.'"
When it comes to open-source, Mozilla and Linux get all the glory. But it's this guy and his amazing SEPY text editor that make my life the joy that it is!
We could all thank them by donating a buck or two to their projects.
What Jon Udell calls a "List of Unsung Heroes", Microsoft calls a "Hit List".
I'm a big tall mofo.
It's a GNU's site.
Do you use Linux? Know how to code?
If so, then you can be a hero too. I never paid for software in the form of money, I personally feel it is alright to spend some of the saved money in the form of personal time when I find bugs, missing features and so on. Sadly, I am not a very experienced programmer, but I have managed to get some small patches into Open Source projects.
This is how you can be a hero also, even if it is just a line of code - the sum of all small snippets like that does eventually help the evolution of Open Source.
So skilled or not, you can be a hero too! Some are great big heros, but even if you just translated a text string, fixed a few lines or code, or just made some graphics -- then you are a small hero (in my eyes) also!
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
All mail clients suck, mutt just sucks the least.
I know a lot more open source developers than the average person. (although perhaps not more than the average Slashdotter), and I can't figure out how there can be enough of them to keep all these projects floating.
For example, how many people were neccesary to put together libsdl-sound1.2 which is one of tens of thousands of packages hiding in the Debian repository, which is just a small piece of all open source projects.
Where are all these open source developers hiding? Is this what my bus driver does when they aren't at work?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
The interesting point he is making here is that FOSS people not only write software - they also make obscure technical information available and accessible.
I remember using gnuplot to make great EPS (encapsulated PostScript) graphs for papers in college. I'm not sure of a better way to put nice charts into LaTeX documents. Even the developers of LaTeX modules for things like rotated charts with regular headers and footers deserve a share of credit.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Recognition always helps. An earlier Slashdot story
I would say the gentleman behind HT Track is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous "unsung heroes of open source" article).
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Patrick with him being a one man band, and being deathly ill. Correct me if im wrong but didn't apple's os use to be open source? or at least free?
BitPim is the only example in that story? I was expecting to see a top 10 list of unsung heroes, but he just writes about one niche piece of software he found useful. You can find more in the average Slashdot article's comments.
You've never seen MY code.
My code is like my handwriting, I know what it's about at the time, but no one, myself included, can decipher it if it comes up again.
John Udell, by writing this post, has just succeeded on bringing one unsung hero - Roger Binns - out of obscurity. Well done, John!!
Developers, Developers, Developers!!!
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
"We could all thank them by donating a buck or two to their projects."
Venison is always a good gift to give.
It's a Ninnle site!
You don't need to code to help out OSS.
Finding bugs, fix spelling mistakes, doing thorough reviews or usability studies, translating help into different languages or even setting you granny up with Linux all go to help OSS.
I think the translates do a Gem of a job, and make OSS accessible to a huge proportion of the world.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Do you realize that this is only the SECOND ninnle post of 2005?
- Alexei Vladishev
- Francesco
- Gerbier Eric
- Jerome Couderc
and many others. The big projects help us get things done, but the small projects make the big projects barable.Find coupons in Greeley
learn to try faster, or spend more time thinking.
I can't write anything legible, because it just doesn't require any though.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The _real_ heroes are the members of the Red Cross who -instead of taking lives- help people _rebuild their lives_ after devestating disasters of all types.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
I'll bet there are hundreds of open source developers scouring these posts right now to see if they show up on someone's list.
whats up?
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i'm back
For example, how many commercial software development jobs come with benefits like this ?
o_o Bad idea.
[Joke: something about unsung heroes being sung about makes them sung heroes and therefore you can't sing an unsung heroes song about them.]
[close with formula joke]
[signature]
Hehe...probably not a good idea to post myself on /. you're thinking? :-)
I can and do donate to F/OSS. You usually get a tax deduction out of the deal, but it is also feels good to give money to those who have done such good work. Having been on the receiving end of this, it also feels great when people acknowledge your work.
I'll definitely be adding more projects to the list of who I will donate to after reading this article. If anyone can help me figure out where to send money to, please post to the email listed on my page or post under this thread.
Salutes are all well and good, but how about some money?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"what, one Shekel for an unemployed ex-leper"
"well i guess there's no pleasing some people"
"that's just what he said, bloody do-gooder"
-- Avishalom is usually vish
My personal hero in the Open Source community is Bill Gates. He has done so much to spur to growth of good software and open source its hard not to pay some tribute to this man.
Alex Shapiro of 'touchgraph' fame
-- Avishalom is usually vish
Linux has piles of coders. But from what I've seen, could use a lot more people making better user interfaces, better graphics for those interfaces, and of course documentation, How-Tos and anything that makes OSS adoption easier for the less geeky of us.
In addition, you don't need to write massive amounts of code to be helpful. Implimenting a new feature can be as simply as a line or 2 of new code to an existing project.
Yes, I too know the delights of gnuplot for graphs, and the usage of make to smush together twenty graphs and diagrams (mmm, dia) into one LaTeX output document.
Have you seen WikiTeX? It allows for direct inclusion of graphviz, gnuplot, LaTeX and LilyPond directly into a wiki page. (It's a MediaWiki extension.) You lose the excellent typesetting, but man is it ever quick and easy.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
SEPY is a flash debugger. Why would anyone on /. want to encourage or faclitate the creation of flash content?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I'm an OS developer, and I go out at night and fight evil. I even have a little cape, and mask, and wear my undies outside my pantyhose.
UP, UP AND AWAY!
I've enjoyed years of amusement and self-education.
OK, it wasn't always painless, but Windows has its panes as well.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Open Source Application that I release publicly. I use Fedora Core, and release apps for network configuration and automation for free. I dont ask for anything ;) just hope that people enjoy it and find it useful.
Software Engineer
Why do people mod something down with the wrong mod? I don't particularly see this as off topic.
It's somebodies opinion on the subject of discussion.
THIS however, is offtopic. As it is marked in the subject. Please don't waste your points modding this down, go do something usefull with it like modding up good discussion items.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
Many developers I know began writing code in college and compiling using gcc for MUDs. Most popular MUDs in my circles were DikuMUD based derived from the work of Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt. (The creator fo CircleMUD, Jeremy Elson, also deserves a mention in my opinion too.) Freely available MUD code helped promote using open source software. I and many of my friends had our first introduction to Linux by finding a OS to run our MUD since we were getting booted off our university's unix boxes. So if you're looking for unsung open source heros, look at those who created and opened up their MUD source code back in the early 1990s.
Homestar Runner.
Try something other than Perl
McGrath is the head developer of the GNU C Library, which is an absolute necessity for an entirely F/OSS system.
Duncan Booth is supporting Nethack port for Psion computers (do you remeber them?) for years. Only small fraction of people (Psion users which are Nethack lovers too) will ever notice value of his work. But for us, Nethack addicts which happen to be also Psion users, he is an ultimate hero. Check it: http://www.suttoncourtenay.org.uk/duncan/Nethack.h tm
I'm sure you can find such people everywhere. Whatever obscure activity you undertake, or whatever strange problem happens to you, you sooner or later meet your hero. I mean - this is how free software works, isn't it?
This Is Not a Sig
...there are ten amateurs releasing their half-finished, undocumented crap to clueless masses who will lose countless hours of time in vain trying to get it to work. They too could become heroes if only they could gather the courage and make their sf.net pages disappear.
- so-I-don't-care-about-your-time culture.
You don't have to use open-source software if you don't like it, you say? The problem is that most of the time, you cannot figure out the quality of what you can oh-so-freely download in advance - gems are rare. Commercial software suffers from this quality assurance problem as well, but open-source projects tend to release much more crap, just because of the widespread I-wannabe-a-hero-but-actually-I-code-just-for-fun
Jim Buzbee was one of the first with his articles on Tom's hardware on Hacking the NSLU2.
There are now a number of developers that have extended the abilities and have added over 50 applications packages. You can see their work at the NSLU2 Wiki. They rock! Thanks guys!!!
It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.
What I'm about to say is probably not going to be taken well, but here goes anyway: Slashdot is probably the "football team / cheerleading squad" of the open source high school -- the place where the coolest of the cool get the most concentrated doses of glory and attention. There are certain people (whose names I shall not defame in this post, lest I get moderated down to -99 or something) who could make a stupid remark about how they think it would be better if people didn't wear matching shoes, and Slashdot would run half a dozen stories about it.
The best example of unsung heroes might be Linas Vepstas. He wasn't one of the "cool kids" so the world pretty much ignored his project, which was to port Linux to IBM mainframes -- he actually got it working, for the most part. IBM ignored his work and went it alone, and nobody knows much about Linas Vepstas now.
Unsung heroes indeed. Let's all try to avoid making open source a fashion show. Most of our best technology was built by nerds, and nerds aren't known for their social skills.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The Slashdot audience is probably better positioned to recognize the true "unsung heroes of OSS" than anyone else.
So -- hey editors, you listening? -- why don't we have a monthly nomination for Unsung Hero of the Month? Let readers send in their candidates, along with a pitch for why they should be featured as an Unsung Hero; then have the editors pick the best pitch, and give that developer a front-page interview on Slashdot.
Heck, maybe even throw in some ad space for his/her project (we're all in this OSS thing together right?). You could probably even have a corporate sponsor pick up the tab for the ad space (the cost would be pretty low, and you could offer them naming rights -- make it, say, the "IBM Open Source Unsung Hero of the Month").
Then archive the interviews in a section of their own (just like "Developers", "Your Rights Online", etc.) so that once there's a bunch of these in the archives they can serve as a kind of Hall of Fame.
This would help introduce people to a whole range of great OSS projects they might otherwise never discover, and give the developers the "ego payment" that for so many folks is the only real reimbursement they get for their hard work...
Read my blog.
Yep last fully open source and useable mud I know of 2d graphics too.
Most of the 3d ones have strict licence on media usage.
The funny thing is that none of my friends would call me unsung or obscure :-)
:-) Having something like BitPim on my resume has been very useful to show that I can actually do things.
h on/msg/16c51c50418bbb7f
As someone else quoted we do not accept money, kickbacks or other forms of financing for BitPim. This is simply because it creates issues. Firstly some initial amount of that will be squandered on dealing with the tax situation it creates. Secondly it creates certain expectations. For example if someone donates and mentions they primarily use a particular operating system, then they wouldn't expect us to drop support for that operating system. Developer time is the most valuable thing, and it is best allocated without being biased by this kind of expectation.
The best kind of help is time from developers, and reproducible issues that on fixing improve the product from users. But anything that is an improvement anywhere is nice.
Don't worry about Microsoft. I've turned down the opportunity to even consider working for them several times. I've even reverse engineered several of their protocols, but sadly the results are all closed source. And I do know several people who have ended up at Microsoft. Not bad people as individuals, but the aggregate actions of the company are questionable.
Yes, I use Linux. And Windows. And a Mac Mini. To me open source and free software is about freedom of choice as an end user. I can use things for whatever they are best at, and later take my data with me to something that is better. Funnily enough, the games I most enjoy come from Microsoft (eg Rise of Nations).
BitPim got started because the closed source people in the cell phone space only supported Windows, and only allowed one installation of their software. (That isn't one concurrent use - it is one installation total. If you have two machines you would have to uninstall and reinstall.)
None of my time on BitPim has been paid for by anyone else. My regular consulting gigs do take time away, but also pay me something to live on
There are also several other people who contribute to BitPim. And *way* more contribute to the components that we use. BitPim is also an example of what you can do with Python.
You can read more at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.pyt
Roger
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
We roam around Microsoft looking for fights
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
We rob from the rich and give to the slashdotters, that's right!
We may look like sissies But watch what you say, or else we'll bring down your sites
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
Always on guard, defending the programmers rights.
The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things. You need that NIC support, after all! ;)
(who you can see here).
This allowed me to get my machine connected back onto WiFi after switching to Linux. Thanks, guys.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
That is a bad idea, though your heart is in the right place. There are just too many of them.
It is trivial to keep hero of the month busy for years, just taking the major contributors to kde who aren't recognized outside of the kde developer comunity. Now toss in the GNOME developers, the x.org developers, various Linux developers, netBSD, freeBSD, battle for Wesnoth, nethack and you have filled a lifetime of months touching many deserving hackers, but missing the large majority of both hackers and worthy projects.
A project of the week isn't even though to list the major projects you should know about, and many of them have more than one developer who is worth listing.
HAND.
hawk, apparently adovcating a real holy war,
Jesse Vincents who took req and ran with it to develop RT.
Thank you, sir.
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
No, the real heroes are the artists, scientists and adventurers who's willingness to push the boundaries of human experience will one day free us from the endless cycle of destroying and rebuilding.
Play Command HQ online
good picks
:)
Also I've heard Microsoft is hiring - but firing Martin Taylor
- Ya know, he is just not quite aggressive enough with all these (hand-picked) "factoids".
Keep practising
*BSD
Interesting.
Can you do one for Solaris as well.
Also do one for Mac OS - just for completion sakes.
Interesting Template Coward.
Master of FUDware.
"Hey babe, come up and see my FOSS project" hasn't exactly been my most successful line.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
SEPY is a flash debugger. Why would anyone on /. want to encourage or faclitate the creation of flash content?
Sure. Flash is only used to annoy the fuck out of you - and the exclusive purpose of VCRs is to flagrantly infringe on media producers' precious IP. Hypocrites.
Get off you VT100 and come join us in this century.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Joe Allen, the creator of Joe's Own Editor (JOE), my favourite text editor.
It has the perfect balance of simplicity and power. Thank you, Joe!
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Uhh, I already signaled that I understand the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Read my post again please.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Where are these graphical kernel interfaces people keep talking about?
No, I didn't, but now I do. Fun!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The "unsung heroes" consist mostly of people writting free software as a hobby. The famous free software developers are usually paid for working on the project full time.
I happen to be paid to work on one free software project full time, and I also work on another free software project as a hobby. A couple of times people have asked if they could donate to the later work. I have always refered them to the FSF. What use would I have for a buck or two? I have a good income, I don't need charity. And my hobby is for fun, not for profit. If you have 60.000 US$, you can hire me for a year, and my hobby would be my job. Otherwise, I'd rather receive patches, bug fixes, and nice words.
Would be to use gnuplot to make great LaTeX graphs. LaTeX is one of the output formats of gnuplot.
The advantage of going directly to LaTeX is that it integrate smoothly, especially with regard to fonts.
The disadvantage is that LaTeX is more limited than EPS, and it take some work to make all the text be the right place.
What? Your primitive culture doesn't have graphical kernel interfaces? How quaint!
Ninnle is dying. Netcraft couldn't be fucking bothered to confirm it.
Two things.
First a tip of the hat to the GnuCash team. I've been Quicken free for almost two years. THANK YOU (and I have sent $$ to the team in appreciation).
Second - Open Source is not new. I have been playing around with computer stuff since '85. Pretty much everything useful I've learned has come from 'the community'. First via CompuServe's forums and later the broader web. Pick an app, system, piece of hardware, whatever and you'll find a forum somewhere that deals with the item. Tons of trash, but always a core group of dedicated volunteers that drive the product forward and help others. People who work for companies that compete with each other check their swords at the door and help each other. A-freaking-mazing!
I love this field!
Dogu
The people that wrote the software had the option of choosing a licence such as the GPL, however, if they chose to put it under a BSD license or similar, why is abiding by that licence which was set by the authors 'taking advantage' of them? They said when they released it that people can do whatever they want with it.
I don't care if my code gets used by a closed-source company, I just want the credit for it. That is why I license my code under BSD or LGPL.
You're wrong! It's BSD that's dying, except for NinnleBSD. Ninnle Linux is very much alive! Linus has it on his personal desktop! So does Gates!
Sorry If my reply implied you where in the wrong
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
Actually I know your affirmation is not true. here is why
First , most people or I should say a good number of the majority who write BSD software are paid to do so by someone else or a company. They dont get to decide the license to be used.
Second , The People who use the BSD license , such as yourself , dont understand it fully , dont get me wrong , but I doubt that your an expert in law or that you add your code contribution closed and yourself unable to use it because the other group included it in there software and are unwhilling to let anyone else modify it or use it, even do it whas your code to begin with.
Third , most BSD licensee look at the open source part of the license and not the rest , the rest enable the owner to close there improvment to other and even the original writer of the code and also to remove the credit ( name recognition ) part.
I will finish by stating that people who use BSD almost in all case dont get the credit ( name recognition ) or the credit ( cold hard cash )when a closed source company gets to use it.
And you see , I "do" care that your code stay open , because frankly you say today that you dont care but you will be like a good number of GNU/Linux writer today who say : I once whas young poor and stupid and got my code taken from me.
keep doing what your doing , its not like we cant buy it and change it to GPL after we improved the code.
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
Gerard of Linux from Scratch is my Open Source Hero! He thought me how to make my own Linux Distro and the support he provides by jumping into the list and patienty and accurately identifying the problem was too good. Once I got a reply from him over the mistake I had made, I felt certain that problem is gonna solve now. WIth so far I have observed Gerard has been very friendly, understanding. Some Linux guys are not so humble with their Linux undertakings and they tend to believe that they are doing some thing great and enterprenual. But being simple,.helping and enjoying are the things which we linux folks want.
Senthil
I didn't notice the troll rating until i hit reply. Since I have this bucket of bile waiting i'll respond anyway:
police and firemen i have no objections to, but praising soldiers as hero's goes way too far.
Why would some dumbass that could not find a proper job, singns up for the money and gets blown up in a country that his president needed invaded be a hero? To me he still is a dumbass that deserved what he signed for.
Offcourse a software developed pales in comparison to someone that risks his own life out of altruism to save that of an unrelated person. But the world does not need every person to be a hero. Hero's are very sparse, and for a good reason: You don't want the situations that define/make a hero happen all the time.
Yes, I am anti-american and I don't support any war whatsoever. If you mod me down for that you just show the sorry state your country is in.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Actually I prefer to be in the next century when "intent to deceive" laws are strictly enforced and violators receive a lifetime incarceration in the moon.
.sigs like this.
I have yet to encounter a flash presentation with all the useless twirling geometrics, gradient colors (yeth, Doktor Frankenstein, yeth. We must add gradient colors. Hmpf, hmpf.) and a barrage of MTV-style image cuts that were shot from odd perspectives that could not have been improved upon by a simple black on white hyperlinked bullet list.
I don't want to be sold about the chome plating, I don't want to be marketed about the sizzle, I want to be informed about the facts of the product and what makes it different from the competitors. I want to be given full disclosure about how much I will have to pay to drag it out the door, right there on the site! I don't want $CALL, I don't want to contact my local reseller. If they can't post the price, then, ipso facto, it obviously has no value. Compare the business ethics of Newegg where the price quoted is before rebates to marketroid efforts of Tigerdirect, Compusa and most others looking to sucker you with small-print, higher out-of-pocket prices, bait & switch tactics and "extended warranty" scams. I am sure it is only a matter of time before a "doc fee" is added by these bozos. Welcome to the reality of a consumer in this century.
P.S. The only VCR I have is gathering dust in a box of stuff I inherited on the death of my parents. I was timeshifting HDTV on a scratch built PVR long before MythTV became all the craze. Yous, I imagine is still blinking 12:00 on the display.
P.P.S. Get a larger vocabulary, profanity generally negates any point attempting to be made and marks one as an insensitive clod and/or an ignoramus.
Momma told me there'd be
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Ippimail is an OS project in itself which is to become a showcase for everything OS.
In the process we want to raise $1m/day for charities across the world. 10% of this will be given back to the OS community
Oh, and we could use some help... :-)
Simon
Get a free email address at http://www.ippimail.com and support your favorite charity without it costing you a penny.
I created a nice list of ways people can contribute to the Open Source projects (and thus become a part of the OSS community) without having to program. The canonical address of the list is currently here.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.