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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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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! ;)