The Most Influential People In Open Source

mmaney writes "As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was mentioned because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent, however, are any influential women." Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism, noting that several people on the list are there "not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments."

Comments

Bill Gates?

[vawarayer]

Someone who makes us want to look for alternatives?

Re:Bill Gates?

[MyLongNickName]

If you read even half the summary, you would see Balmer on the list. Believe me, I had the same thought on reading the title of the article, but Steve's inclusion certainly covers it.

Re:Bill Gates?

[ozmanjusri]

Believe me, I had the same thought on reading the title of the article, but Steve's inclusion certainly covers it.

He was also heavily involved in the creation of the "Most Influential" document.

It's really just a leaked copy of Microsoft Enforcement squad's hit list.

Re:Bill Gates?

[richlv]

just a couple of days ago i heard somewhat known person in opensource community (and as it turns out, an extremely nice guy) comment on such a list - most likely the same one.
he said something along the lines on "they just asked some guys with financial interest in all this, but who actually do not care or have any idea what open source or free software actually means, name somebody - so they just named each other".

looking at the list, i find very few arguments against that.

WTF?

[jcr]

How can these people be "influential" when nobody's ever heard of them?

-jcr

Re:WTF?

[epiphani]

I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.

There are plenty of people we would all recognize that should be on a list of influential on open source.

Re:WTF?

[jkroll]

I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.

Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.

Re:WTF?

[rohan972]

From TFS: Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact.

What's so hard to understand? When Ballmer started mouthing off about open source it was probably the first time lots of people heard of it. Just because he wasn't influential in the way he would have liked doesn't mean he didn't have an influence. They aren't pretending that he's deliberately helping.

Re:WTF?

[Radtoo]

It is really the list of "the top influential Executives of the 2009", as is stated further down in the article.

Re:WTF?

[Roebot]

You have never heard of VA Linux, Sourceforge, SugarCRM, Redhat, Alfresco, Drupal? Really?

Re:WTF?

[TheRaven64]

I wish I hadn't heard of Drupal...

Re:WTF?

[wondershit]

I think you confuse influential with famous.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really have to go over this?

"The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry."

And all you had to read was the summary. These people were not selected for their influence on Slashdot.

I suppose you could argue against what the summary claims, but "nobody's ever heard of them" is the kind of typical Slashdot argument that doesn't go anywhere.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes.

Now executives in those companies? No, not really.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

"MindTouch asked C and VP level..." should have been you're first clue.

Re:WTF?

[Vexorian]

It's funny that in occasion of this clueless survey, Matt Asay has taken yet another chance to show that he has been ... peeing outside the recipient lately... His new blog piece is sort of the way to crown his recent series of bitter non-sense... I can't resist the need to link to Open Source is dead, long live Casino Open Source?...

Re:WTF?

[treeves]

Exactly my thought. For example, how many people (not on /. which is *not* representative of the whole population) have heard of Shockley, Bardeen, Kilby et al. who invented transistors and ICs, which have had such a huge impact on life as we know it?

Re:WTF?

[JohnBailey]

Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.

Are you kidding?? Steve is a fantastic Linux asset. The 235 patents story must have made way more column inches in the IT media that the release of a new kernel or the launch of compiz ever could. Even publications that never carry open source stories would have reported on this. The Linux shopping spree and the subsequent full stop and panicked withdrawal alone I'm sure did more to publicise Linux and GPL3 than a bunch of full page adverts. It's kind of the same as when the music and movie industries seed the media with stories about file sharing, and practically advertise the torrent apps and p2p systems.

Interesting list, more current than most

[Night Goat]

Although the article was very thin on details, I thought that it was worthwhile. It put a new spin on things because the list dealt with who was currently influential, rather than trotting out the old names that we've seen on lists like this for the last fifteen years. I realized after reading the article that I just don't care that much, though. Good thing they chose corporate types to put together this list, since they'll get a charge out of reading it.

Fifty votes from "executives"?

[jcr]

So, no votes from anyone who's actually, you know, writing any open source code?

-jcr

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Code is the least important part of any project. That is why programmers are given little attention in these types of surveys.

In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most. Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and other non-code related things are far more important than the day to day coding that most of the engineering staff engages in.

Not to say that the final product isn't important, but it is just much less important than the decisions that lead to the creation of that software. In this sense, Open Source has a chance to shine because it allows the hotshot programmer to drive technology in ways he wants to, but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.

So we'll never see another programmer at the top of these charts like we did back when Linux was first emerging as a valid alternative to entrenched Unix systems.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[wisty]

I'll agree. People like Knuth, Larry, and Guido were more important for their documentation and marketing efforts than their actual code.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[jcr]

it is the business side of the company that matters the most.

That's the kind of thinking that destroys companies.

-jcr

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that's what happening at Apple?

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[jcr]

No, it's what happened at Apple in the mid 90's, that caused them to go through a near-death experience. Since then, they take coding very seriously.

-jcr

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Vellmont]

  but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.

Ha! If by replaced you mean added to. Companies selling open source software is a Good Thing. It means the open source movement has been successful. How is it exploitation?

So we'll never see another programmer at the top of these charts like we did back when Linux was first emerging as a valid alternative to entrenched Unix systems.

Another laugh! Which "these charts" are you talking about? This whole article was written by a two-bit player selling collaboration software. Ever heard of them? I hadn't. This isn't even written by crappy journalists who don't know what they're talking about, it's written by crappy marketers who don't know what they're talking about.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[kc8apf]

Speaking as a former Apple employee: so _that's_ why a bunch of senior engineers in the hardware devision were let go or put in such a horrible situation that they left. Apple isn't being that great to their engineers and is focusing more on how hard they can drive them to produce new products every 6 months.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Anonymous Coward]

In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most. Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and other non-code related things are far more important than the day to day coding that most of the engineering staff engages in.

Substitute cars for software. In terms of the automobile industry, the code (and their associated specs and unit tests, which were written by the programmers) would represent design, engineering, and manufacturing. Now let's try your thesis again:

Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and related things are far more important than the day-to-day design, engineering, and manufacture of the automobiles.

I bet there are many (former) executives in Detroit who would have agreed with that statement. Maybe that explains why they were doing so well.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[khallow]

Code is the least important part of any project.

Not if the code is the project, which is usually the state of things with open source projects.

In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most.

In companies with serious programming efforts, do executives get paid more than all their programmers collectively?

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[jcr]

a bunch of senior engineers in the hardware devision were let go or put in such a horrible situation that they left.

Don't know what you mean by "a bunch", butI heard that when Apple went from PPC to Intel, they let some ASIC engineers go since they didn't have to make their own motherboard chipsets anymore. Is that what you're referring to?

-jcr

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[jc42]

Companies selling open source software is a Good Thing. It means the open source movement has been successful. How is it exploitation?

There's a difference?

(Actually, I did do a google "define:" check. The results were worded somewhat differently, but I couldn't pin down an actual difference in meaning. I do suspect that we're talking about different words used to "frame" an issue by different subcultures.)

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[lawpoop]

Well, realistically, how much code can someone actually write? I think the most influential people are going to be those those who can corral and co-ordinate the efforts of disparate people to work together one one big project that no single person can handle alone. They maybe never even write code themselves.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[blind biker]

You can sell that BS to closed-source companies, but in the OS world projects live and die by the developer community.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Vellmont]

I agree that there are mutiple definitions of the word exploit. I don't agree that they're used differently in different "subcultures". Exploit meaning to take advantage of unfairly is a commonly used definition that crosses culture, as does exploit meaning to utilize (exploit a natural resource). Like any other word with multiple definitions the context in which it's used is what determines which definition is accurate.

Arguing about semantics is irrelevant. It's fairly clear the GP was using the unfair advantage definition. The GP context was one hostile towards commercial software taking on an OSS model.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Kjella]

Ultimately it can't not be about the business, because that's the whole purpose of running a business. If you're not serving the needs of what's generating income, you're not doing a very good job. But IT also needs to have backbone and say "you know what you want, we know what can be delivered". And IT often has to be those saying you have to invest today so you can keep generating income tomorrow too. But I've met far too many that deliver something that is technically correct and/or neat, yet completely useless to anyone in the real world. It's very annoying.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[ilctoh]

"That's the kind of thinking that destroys companies." [Citation Needed]

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And do you have any first-hand knowledge about how Apple treats its engineers, or are you just spewing fanboy diarrhea?

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Fifty votes from "executives"?

[kc8apf]

No, I was referring to a number of employees being forced out or let go in the past year. In fact, many of the ASIC engineers laid off after the Intel switch were hired back less than a year later to work on the iPhone SoC designs.

Open Source Evangelism

[Anonymous Coward]

Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism
 
If anything, raving fanbois screaming that Microsoft is "teh suck" is doing more to hurt open source than help.
 
I'm a vegetarian. I don't preach to people about it. I don't need other people to follow my path to make me feel good about what I do but I always welcome those who are interested. I find that screaming at people for eating meat is annoying and counter productive. Instead I'd have much more success coming off as a rational being and helping people who want to be vegetarians become vegetarians. Thrusting my ideals on someone who is happy where they are at is only going to make them more at odds with me and my ideals.
 
They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without. That isn't happening today. These apps don't exist.

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[betterunixthanunix]

"They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without. That isn't happening today. These apps don't exist."

In my opinion, the reason those apps do not exist is that consumers really only care about 4 apps at most, and that number is really reduced to one app in this day and age. There are plenty of things I am doing with free/open source software that are could not be done without spending a fortune on proprietary licensing, but they are things that consumers do not care about. As a simple example, I frequently access systems remotely, sometimes while other people are using them; with Windows XP, this was not possible without purchasing an expensive, "enterprise edition" license, or using some kind of crack. Most people hear this and shrug -- they really do not see this as a particularly important feature or activity, more of a novelty than anything else, and it is certainly not convincing enough to get them to take the terrifying step of switching. It is the same with just about everything; even security is a tough sell, with most people having been conditioned that worms and viruses are just an unavoidable fact of life, certainly not worth the effort of using some software that they have never heard of.

It really boils down to whether or not proprietary licensing is causing a problem for them. For someone who is just browsing the web and using no-cost plugins like Flash, they will never encounter licensing restrictions in any meaningful way. The only desktop users who really feel the pain of proprietary licensing are "power users," and they usually have some Linux distro installed already. With them, though, there is a substantial fear of ditching proprietary software entirely, but that is the same story we have dealt with for years.

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[maxume]

There are open source/free software VNC programs that work on Windows XP, like TightVNC:

http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[Alwin Henseler]

They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without.

... Or to have it pre-installed on their new computer.

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[jc42]

In my opinion, the reason those apps do not exist is that consumers really only care about 4 apps at most, and that number is really reduced to one app in this day and age. There are plenty of things I am doing with free/open source software that are could not be done without spending a fortune on proprietary licensing, but they are things that consumers do not care about.

This is the history of much or our technology. New things are developed out of public sight, by people who want them for their own narrow purposes. Thus, most people would tell you that the World Wide Web was invented by Microsoft. In fact, it started of at CERN, a totally meaningless name to 99% of the Web's users, to make it easier for physicists to share their experimental data, research papers, etc. Outside of the geek community, hardly anyone has ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee, and he wouldn't make it onto any lists made by anyone not involved in Web development.

This is the norm. Last night I was at an event where I was approached by several people who told me how much they appreciate my web site and the things I've done for them. I won't mention the topic, because it's just one of many similar stories. This includes my usual explanation that I really did it for my own nefarious purposes. I'd found a growing number of sites that had data of a sort that I find useful. I made a sort of combined aggregator/index/search site, because I was annoyed with the time I was wasting trying to find things on those other sites, and decided "This is a job for the computer". I set it up as a web site so that I could use it anywhere that I had Net access. I mentioned it to a few colleagues, who mentioned it to a few others, and now it has between 5000 and 1000 hits most days. It's not a huge commercial thing, and probably never will be, but it's useful to a few tens of thousands of people (much less than 1% of the world's population).

Of the many such online development, most of them are free/open source because they have no obvious commercial potential. Eventually, a few may reach some sort of public notice. At that time, the commercial world will probably pick up on what has happened. A few corporate giants will to buy them out (or reverse engineer them) and commercialize them. This will probably include incorporating them into the big, monolithic apps that we're all familiar with. People will say how wonderful this new thing is that corporation X has invented. And they'll say that the Open Source stuff is still irrelevant, because it doesn't provide anything that people want.

These predictions are fairly easy, because it's how things have always been done. If you dig a bit, you can probably find examples in whatever area you're intimately familiar with.

The really glaring example is the "Windows" GUI that's been so much discussed here. Insiders know about the Xerox PARC project that started it all. But probably even most /. readers don't know about its origins, because they only know the decade-later version commercialized by Microsoft, and they judge everything else by how well it mimics this particular offshoot of the original project. This is, of course, a loser's game, since you can't possibly track a moving target whose future moves are secret. But it's likely that right now there are a few small projects underway that, in a few more years or decades, will suddenly appear in the public eye as a huge improvement, to be taken over by the corporate marketers and sold as their marvelous new development. But it won't be produced anyone trying to clone the current market leader.

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[Anonymous Coward]

you are right but you totally missed the point

Re:Open Source Evangelism

[betterunixthanunix]

Which is fine if all nobody else is logged in. As I noted in my post, I care about remote access where I do not have to worry about interfering with someone else who is using the machine, which is not something *VNC can give you in Windows XP. I cannot attest to the situation with Vista or Windows 7, but I would be willing to bet that, given the more restrictive licensing in those systems, this functionality is even more restricted.

Or has the situation changed?

Execs, etc

[Roebot]

I want to note there are a few who actually contribute code listed. BUT it's important to understand that this top influencers list was actually a byproduct of a survey conducted establishing best practices in open source sales and marketing. Hence the distinctly business slant. This list of top influences has been so remarkably well received that we intend to do it every year. However, in the future survey we will include CTOs and VP of Engs in order to create two categories. Business/Law and engineering. Thanks for the feedback. Please post additional suggestions to the post and we'll try out best to incorporate them.

Re:Execs, etc

[Vellmont]

Wow. You've completely missed the whole culture of open source. Your whole article assumes a completely different context. Top influencer's of what? Top influencer's of who? Business guys? Maybe.

What you seemed to have missed is that "Open Source" generally consists of the people doing the actual work writing the code, designing the infra-structure, etc. It isn't like a traditional business where the Big Business Boys are in charge and call all the shots. That's not to say it's completely grass roots either. It really is Eric Raymond's Bazaar, and trying to shoehorn it into a traditional business structure and naming some CEOs with influence completely misses the point. The fact that you think you can fix this by naming some CTOs and VPs of engineering in a separate list is extraordinarily telling that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:Execs, etc

[slashdotmsiriv]

So this is a list that gives credit only to business people for the success of Open Source ...

You are missing: Linus Torvalds (Linux creator), Eric S. Raymond (Open Source advocate), Bruce Perens (started Debian Linux and coined the term “Open Source”), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation spiritual father),

If you were aiming to credit people with substantial influence in the business part of IT, then why did you omit:
Bob Young & Marc Ewing (Red Hat founders) and Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders).

This is just a list of nobodies (OSS-wise) that at some point in their life decided to use OSS in their business ... This is insulting really. Please no more
of these self-validation articles!

Re:Execs, etc

[Roebot]

Actually, I wrote that next year we will include CTO and VP of Eng votes in the survey as well. It's a terrible thing we didn't this year. But we didn't expect a byproduct such as this. Had we, we would have segmented the list to be sure to capture influential persons on the engineering/innovation side.

A digression, as for "Big Boys" I have always found it interesting that open source execs typically come up from an engineering track. This is less the case with proprietary software.

I'll reiterate what I've written elsewhere about this list. I can speak from my experience in both building software on open source, working at proprietary software companies and in founding and building an open source company, this list doesn't hold many surprises for me. I write this because over the last four years of being solely focused on building an open source software biz, I have witnessed the people on this list as being the most active. How so? By helping young open source companies (yes, companies) to get their start and in helping proprietary companies to transition to an open source model. These people are responsible for a very significant amount of code being released under open source. This is true because many have pioneered sustainable models, actively influenced "Big Boys" to open source code, helped other young-uns to innovate and even have opened their own wallets to fund the development of open source software.

As for those early pioneers of open source, there can be no doubt they have had a huge impact. However, there is no doubt in my mind that history will prove this list to be a quality sampling of the **current** positive influencers.

Re:Execs, etc

[Vellmont]

Uh huh. So you didn't address any of my points, you just steer around them while trying to move the conversation to your own agenda and hope nobody notices. That's marketing for you.

"Cut to a commercial!"
"We are a commercial!"
"Cut to _another_ commercial"

Re:Execs, etc

[richlv]

as i mentioned before, the list has been received less than favourably in opensource circles.
the view has been that you have chosen people who actually do not help or even are really influential in opensource, just a club of some sociophats who try to get more money out of the opensource by twisting it.

i don't have a boilerplate advice for you - but maybe concentrating next time on people who actually believe and _do_ real free/opensource software would help somewhat.
now what does that mean ? looking at people who really produce completely free and opensource software, not ones who just use it as a marketing method and a thing to exploit. while they might seem influential at the first glance, they do not get much love and long life in the theatre. wondering why.

Re:Execs, etc

[mevets]

Reread roebots post - your missing the sarcasm, he should be modded Funny, right down to a "suggestion box". I'm surprised he didn't add a working group.

Re:Execs, etc

[nomadic]

Linus Torvalds (Linux creator)

True, and his kernel development supervision keeps him on the list even today.

Eric S. Raymond (Open Source advocate)

Influential in his own mind maybe. Serious proponents of OSS gave up listening to that fruitcake years ago, I'd estimate at some point after the racism, but before the terrorist paranoia.

Bruce Perens (started Debian Linux and coined the term "Open Source"

Debian was started by Ian Murdock (hence the -ian part; the deb comes from his wife's name). And "open source" was coined long before OSI took credit for it.

You could probably make a better argument that Perens deserves to be on the list through his lobbying, especially on the international stage.

Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation spiritual father)

Well more important than its spiritual father, he's its president, so I think that gets him on the list.

Re:Execs, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Be a bit fair. The names you listed are all old. If they are going to do a anual listing of importent OSS people, then they should at least aim for current/new people in that year. That means it'll most likely be people you never heard of, people that did something namable that year. No point reinterating what everyone already knows, after all.

Re:Execs, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and where's Don Becker CTO of Penguin - who basically had his hands on every network device driver ever written for linux and also invented fucking BEOWULF clusters?

Re:Execs, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Remarkably well received by whom? Your readers?

I know salesmen like to exaggerate, but these people are not the most influential in the "open source industry", despite how you title your blog posts. They may be the most influential in a niche. Best for you that you clearly identify that niche, before you are subjected to quite a bit of ridicule by the people who actually make the products you're trying to peddle.

Everyone

[dandart]

Everyone's a hero in open source.

Linus Torvalds is missing....

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I'd say he's still fairly influential in the open source community.

Re:Linus Torvalds is missing....

[dgr73]

Linus who? I vote for the dude in the penguin suit.

Re:Linus Torvalds is missing....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who?

Slashdotted

[eln]

I'm very impressed with this list. It's about time the venerable Mr. Error Establishing a Database Connection got his due.

Re:Slashdotted

[JaumPaw]

Well, that's a lot better than the military regime of General Failure and his 3 unruly options.

Influence

[Wowsers]

I'd like to think that the end users are the most influential people in open source projects.

Re:Influence

[betterunixthanunix]

Most end users do not even bother filing bug reports or feature requests, let alone writing any code or discussing issues on mailing lists.

Influential Women

[Iwanowitch]

Here is one: Leslie Hawthorn. She organizes Google's Summer Of Code, which has brought thousands of students (myself included) in an active role of participating in various open source projects. It's an absurdly hard task to coordinate thousands of students and mentors each year, to make sure all information, payments, shirts, ... are sent out in time, to organize the mentor summit, and meanwhile try to solve all problems that come up underway. She does it extremely well and I think the open source community can't thank her enough. I honestly don't think there's much more you could do to influence open source.

Go Leslie!

Re:Influential Women

[inode_buddha]

I would also nominate PJ at Groklaw, for applying FOSS principles and practices to IP law.

Re:Influential Women

[betterunixthanunix]

Hate to break it to you, but organizing thousands of developers is nothing new in open source. Look at the big Linux distros, and how their leaders keep everyone in line and organized. You think GSoC is difficult to organize? Try managing Debian or Fedora, where you have to deal not only with your own people and finances, but also with upstream maintainers and the weird decisions they make. GSoC involves keeping all the different, largely unrelated projects in line; a Linux distro supervisor needs to make sure that all the packages in the distro will play nicely with each other. Distro maintainers also have to deal with users, who sometimes make absurd demands and are insulted when they do not get what they want (e.g. the people who demand that Fedora ship with SELinux disabled by default).

Not to make Leslie Hawthorn's task seem easy, but I would hardly call her the most influential open source leader out there.

Re:Influential Women

[Anonymous Coward]

PJ is a better candidate than Hawthorn, I'd say. And Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker too.

Re:Influential Women

[sohp]

Allison Randal, President emeritus of the Perl Foundation, Chairman of the Parrot Foundation, O'Reilly author.

Re:Influential Women

[Ysangkok]

Audrey Tang, IQ 180, author of Pugs

Re:Influential Women

[vlm]

You mention Debian, then mention the job title "supervisor"...

a Linux distro supervisor needs to make sure that all the packages in the distro will play nicely with each other

Can you describe your experience with Debian's supervisors and management team?

(Disclaimer, I have some personal experience with this exact topic. It is handled in an effective mostly-anarchistic way, without any "management overhead", which I doubt the fine article's writers and readers can comprehend.)

Re:Influential Women

[petrus4]

I would also nominate PJ at Groklaw, for applying FOSS principles and practices to IP law.

Yes, Pamela is to be congratulated. Groklaw's single main purpose is allowing the translation of a neurotypical legal system, for a largely autistic audience.

That isn't meant as a troll, either, so please don't interpret it as one. Even the neurotypicals themselves generally find their legal system virtually impossible to comprehend, so I often wonder how on Earth we are supposed to cope with it.

Re:Influential Women

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of cheating, though.

Re:Influential Women

[Vexorian]

Well, she's still been more influential than just about half of this list anyway...

Re:Influential Women

[Anonymous Coward]

I was pleased to meet Leslie this summer at OSCON.

Rock on, Leslie!

My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people consider Linus, RMS, Larry Wall or Guido to be their Open Source Heroes. Not me. My Open Source Hero is John C. Randolph.

Now I know you're going to ask, Why is John C. Randolph your Open Source Hero? Let me tell you why!

First, he's a man of intelligence, integrity, experience and trust. When I see a USENET or Slashdot post signed with "-jcr", I know it's worth reading. Unlike much of the tripe here, I know that I will learn something new each time I indulge in reading one of his glorious posts.

Second, he says it as it is. When -jcr speaks, I listen.

Third, he's an expert when it comes to the technologies that came out of NeXT, and survive today as Mac OS X. Instead of having GNOME and KDE focusing on replicating Windows, like is so often the case, they should be focusing on replicating the NeXT/Apple experience. GNUstep tries, but they're just not there yet. Sometimes I have dreams that John unites those three projects into The Open Source Desktop, and then life is beautiful.

So there you have it. That is why John C. Randolph is my Open Source Hero.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jcr]

Well, thanks, but I don't see how my experience with NeXTSTEP and the Mac make me any kind of hero, let alone an "open source hero". I've given a little bit of code away in my time, but it's not like it's any kind of mission I'm on.

As for GnuStep, it's a nice try, but once Apple and NeXT merged and the danger of NeXTSTEP vanishing altogether was alleviated, that really took the wind out of GnuStep's sails. The Linux crowd doesn't care about it, and the Mac crowd doesn't need it.

they should be focusing on replicating the NeXT/Apple experience.

I have to disagree with you on that. Trying to match any existing system is shooting too low. I remember when Visix was very proud of bringing "the Mac level of UI to UNIX" back around 1987 or so. I interviewed with them, and told them that unless they were looking to substantially exceed what the Mac offered, they shouldn't bother.

What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done. Trying to make it like Windows is tragic, and trying to make it like the Mac is just never going to be good enough.

-jcr

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[Anonymous Coward]

i have no idea who you are but whats some open source that youve released? where can i download it?

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jcr]

I'm not sure if you still can find it, but I contributed some code to the MiscKit, which was a collection of code for NeXTSTEP developers. If you're developing code on the Mac, you might have some use for the sample code I did when I was at Apple, which I described here.

More recently, I posted a couple of little iPhone hacks here and here.

-jcr

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[pherthyl]

>> What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done.

Why? The UI is more or less a solved problem, sort of like the controls of a car. Yes there are some minor innovations here and there. Someone adds some taskbar effects or a nicer way of moving through open windows, or someone adds a steering wheel control for the radio. These little tweaks will go on for a long time, but the basic idea of a desktop is a solved problem, and doesn't need re-inventing. Just like the car, where our standard design is almost perfect for most people, and all of the radical attempts at revamping it have failed because they offer no significant advantage.

The desktop UI isn't going anywhere until we move away from our current interfaces. The next major step will happen when we're no longer tied to a keyboard/mouse combo. Until then why whinge about the state of the UI? It fits the application just fine.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jcr]

The UI is more or less a solved problem, sort of like the controls of a car.

If you believe that, then by all means, enjoy what you can buy today. Heck, I know people who still live in EMACS.

-jcr

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[oldhack]

What's with the astrotufing, man?

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[iammani]

If the mouse was never invented, EMACS (and vi) would still be one of the best interfaces. But the mouse was invented and things changed. I believe the grant parent had already covered this, by saying unless we are to drop the keyboard/mouse, dont expect a UI revamp.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, EMACS has a nice UI. Too bad it lacks a good editor....

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[TeknoHog]

If the mouse was never invented, EMACS (and vi) would still be one of the best interfaces. But the mouse was invented and things changed.

I use a mouse and lots of graphical applications, but I also use emacs in a text terminal. There must be something wrong with me, since I like using different tools for different jobs.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[TheRaven64]

As for GnuStep, it's a nice try, but once Apple and NeXT merged and the danger of NeXTSTEP vanishing altogether was alleviated, that really took the wind out of GnuStep's sails

I have to disagree with you there. Some of the most active GNUstep developers (both in terms of core development and building on top of GNUstep) joined the project since 2004, after getting their first experience with Cocoa. GNUstep stalled early on due to the the decision by the FSF to pay the makers of Ghostscript to implement a Display PostScript server. They failed, and development of GNUstep's AppKit was held up while waiting for it to finish, then when it was clear that it never would, development had to go backwards for a while. During this time, GNUstep only attracted developers who were experienced with NeXT systems. Given that NeXT only sold around 50,000 machines, this was quite a small audience. Now Apple owns around 10% of the desktop market and anyone who develops with Cocoa can see the attraction in the APIs, so there is a much larger body of interest in GNUstep. The project is still actively developed - we had blocks (which Apple introduced with 10.6) working before Apple released their implementation to the public and had a few of the 10.6 classes (e.g. NSCache) completely implemented within a couple of days of the Snow Leopard release.

What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done. Trying to make it like Windows is tragic, and trying to make it like the Mac is just never going to be good enough.

That's what we're trying to do with Étoilé. We're building a document-centric desktop with automatic persistence and versioning integrated throughout the system, and trying to get away from the application-centric model. We've stolen some good ideas from OS X, classic MacOS, NeXT, RiscOS, the Newton and a few other places, but we're not trying to clone OS X, we're trying to build something better. It's slow, but we've made a lot of progress in the last year and having GNUstep as a foundation helped enormously.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[he-sk]

I have to disagree.

On thing that's seriously broken with modern GUIs is their file- or application-oriented workflow. Everything-is-a-file is a great abstraction when writing code, but it's not how people think.

Things on my wishlist:

* a task-oriented desktop
* easy adding of free-form metadata to files (think digital post-it notes attached to files)
* the gold standard: a GUI that realizes when I'm repeating myself and automates these processes by itself

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[he-sk]

Talking to yourself, aren't you? ;-)

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[Anonymous Coward]

>> What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done.

Why? The UI is more or less a solved problem, sort of like the controls of a car.

You've evidently never driven a car with:
* a manual gearbox
* a choke
* non-power assisted steering
* non-ABS brakes
* ...

The fact is modern cars have pretty much reduced the UI to an on switch, a couple of pedals for stop and go and a wheel for turning. You don't have to manually adjust the gearing (it's automatic). You don't have to adjust the fuel/air mixture (fuel injection does it for you). You don't have to turn the wheel more at lower speeds (it's adjusted for you). You don't have to worry about the brakes locking up (ABS).

The desktop paradigm is outdated (who even needs a desk any more). It doesn't scale well or at all to netbooks or smartphones. It's far to easy for it to get cluttered and bloated. It doesn't work well with touchscreens. It assumes and requires both keyboard and mouse. You can't move an item from a desktop at one location to another (like you could with a real physical desk). Poorly designed modal windows can allow one program to block the entire desktop (I'm looking at you NetworkManager) and instafocus pop-up dialogs can kill everything and reboot your machine when you press enter just as they grab focus (I'm looking at you Windows Update).

There is still so much left to do. Maybe Apple will inspire people. Maybe KDE will get the semantic desktop off the ground. Maybe Maemo will give us a scalable smartphone UI. I guess we won't know we're done until RMS stops using Emacs.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[Anonymous Coward]

What a convenient coincidence that an AC would post this, isn't it?

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[pherthyl]

The UI is more or less a solved problem, sort of like the controls of a car.

If you believe that, then by all means, enjoy what you can buy today. Heck, I know people who still live in EMACS.

-jcr

I do believe that. And the last 20 years of UI design is evidence for me being right. There is incremental evolution, but all the radical concepts fell by the wayside. Good luck with that.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[pherthyl]

You completely miss the point. Manual gearboxes are all almost the same since the 1920s. A choke is a tiny detail (my bike still has one). Manual steering is a tiny detail (how much effort does it take), and ABS doesn't affect the interface at all.

>> It doesn't scale well or at all to netbooks

Market proves you wrong. The first netbooks had customized interfaces with icon launchers and whatever. People didn't like it. Now almost every single netbook uses bone-stock windows.

>> or smartphones

Completely different and we're not talking about that at all. The topic here is linux UI, not phone-UI.

>> It assumes and requires both keyboard and mouse

That's exactly what I said. The current desktop metaphor will remain until we move on to a different set of input devices. Touch screens will never be mainstream in a desktop computing environment, so that next generation is going to be more like direct muscle or brain input. That's decades away.

All the rest of your gripes are due to shitty software, not anything fundamentally wrong with the UI. There's lots to do, but nothing groundbreaking. Just tweaks.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[petrus4]

I do believe that. And the last 20 years of UI design is evidence for me being right. There is incremental evolution, but all the radical concepts fell by the wayside. Good luck with that.

This is true. It also isn't good for development to be excessively radical. Radical development goes at a pace which does not allow human minds to be able to cope.

I still remain very adamantly convinced that the most effective form of user interface in existence, is made up of the group of text utilities that were devised during the 70s and early 80s. They work, they work well, and they also tend to work far more consistently and reliably than the newest GUI environments, as well.

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jcr]

Some of the most active GNUstep developers (both in terms of core development and building on top of GNUstep) joined the project since 2004, after getting their first experience with Cocoa.

When I talk about the wind being taken out of its sails, I'm referring to interest beyond GnuStep's implementors. I think you guys have done some fine work, but the interest among the users just isn't there.

-jcr

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jonaskoelker]

Heck, I know people who still live in EMACS.

I really have a hard time believing that.

C-x C-s
C-x C-c

Re:My Open Source Hero: John C. Randolph

[jcr]

If I wanted to make something up to make myself look good, "open source hero" isn't in my top ten accolades I'd like to have.

-jcr

Ha

[Norsefire]

has been so remarkably well received

Give it another hour ... The absence of at least one of Torvalds, Stallman, ESR, Larry Wall, or even just a pro-OSS person we have actually heard of will have people screaming (perhaps rightfully so).

Please, NOT Eric Raymond, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I could get on board with almost anything here, but please! please..PLEASE!:
No More Eric fricking (I am so full of myself) Raymond.

I am not going to read the list (just in case).

Re:This list is disappointing.

[jcr]

Nothing wrong with being white, male, or rich. The problem with the list is that it claims to be the top "influencers", and I really can't picture anyone asking themselves "gee, what would those guys think?" when deciding how to proceed with any open-source project.

-jcr

My List

[Anonymous Coward]

In no particular order: Miguel de Icaza -- Exploring/Pushing the boundaries between Propritary and OSS Brian "Krow" Aker -- Leading a refactoring/reimaginging of Mysql in a trully open fashion, from within the same company. Linus Torvolds -- duh RMS -- double duh mark shuttleworth -- don't especially like ubuntu, but lets face it: its big, and easy for noobs.

Infuential People in Open Source Marketing?

[Rotten]

I think that "Open Source" means something different to me..maybe I'm getting older... Does the whole idea of "Open Source" has been kidnaped by the corporate *bs* and rebranded with a new background, meaning and of course, new corporate "heroes"?

Re:Infuential People in Open Source Marketing?

[jc42]

Does the whole idea of "Open Source" has been kidnaped by the corporate *bs* and rebranded with a new background, meaning and of course, new corporate "heroes"?

Nah; it just means that the people who did this survey didn't bother talking to anyone who really knows what Open Source is or who might be influencing a lot of others right now. They talked to a bunch of top corporate management guys, who mostly have no knowledge of or interest in where their lowly workers are getting their ideas or tools. That's for the bean counters, y'know. To most of them, Open Source is a marketing phrase with growing positive connotations, and that's all they need to know about it.

Pretty much the same thing applies to the question of why there were no influential women in the results. Did they actually ask any female executives? (And have they verified that all those "foreign" names belong to males? ;-)

Actually, I wonder how this would work out if you asked the programmers. How many of you involved in programming actually know the sex of any of the authors of the software that you're downloading? Do you even care? I'm reasonably certain that Linus is male, but for most of the open source software that I have on my machine, I can't actually tell you much about the authors. Often I don't even recall their name, and would have to look it up in the code. I know I've seen feminine names there, but I haven't paid that much attention. I've also noticed a lot of foreign names that I can't assign to a sex.

Re:Infuential People in Open Source Marketing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Open Source" was specifically created to be a non-threatening, business friendly euphemism for "Free Software". It has hardly been "kidnapped" by the corporate *bs*, since it was their own creation and has always belonged to them.

Re:Infuential People in Open Source Marketing?

[Anonymous Coward]

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But what about...

[lucm]

...Darl McBride? I think he is someone who had an effect on the open source industry.

Industry gossip

[oldhack]

This is industry marketing dribble where they think "Open Source" is a fashionable marketing slogan.

Hear Hear!

[wowbagger]

"What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done."

Hear Hear! Yes, I too am a little disappointed that the "zenith" of Free Software seems to be cloning the look and feel of Windows, which is cloning the Mac, etc.

What about some real ground-breaking stuff - how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Hell, why can't I just drag a file to a printer icon to print it? Why do I have to OPEN the file, then print it?

Let's look at the old OS/2 Workplace shell - let's make every file an object, with methods, selectable via drag or via right click.

Rather than using 3D just to view 2D windows in a glitzy way, let's try to do something meaningful with it.

Yes, some of the above ideas may not work out, but let's at least start exploring them and finding out WHICH ones don't work and which ones do?

Let's not let the "But people are used to the way Windows does things, and thus we cannot change anything away from that paradigm" ball-and-chain keep us from moving forward.

Why can't we tie man pages/info pages and other help into one source, so that we can have the advantages of both being able to search a global help database (apropos printing), being able to view the man pages for a program without running it (man lpr), AND still having those pages be context-linked into the programs?

Re:Hear Hear!

[jcr]

how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

I think you'd like Apple's Quartz Composer app. It's visual data-flow system for generating motion graphics, and its diagram editor would be great for plugging UNIX pipes and filters together.

-jcr

Re:Hear Hear!

[TheRaven64]

Why even make files a UI metaphor at all? I did a little experiment a few years ago. I got around twenty people, some computer scientists, some completely nontechnical, some from a scientific background but not directly related to computers, to define a file for me. Only two of them gave me the same definition, and they were from a UNIX background so defined a file as an untyped stream of bytes with a name associated with them. Almost half answered with something along the lines of 'I don't really know'. Then I asked people what a document was. There answers weren't all the same, but they were close and people were a lot more certain that they could define a document than a file.

A UNIX file is a nice abstraction for the OS to present to programmers, because it's simple to build complex things on top of it. It is a terrible abstraction to present to users. Try explaining to a user why a Word document can contain images in the file but an HTML document refers to images in an external file, so dragging one to a disk works fine and dragging the other to the disk loses all of the inline images some time and you'll see quite how bad an abstraction files are. NeXT-style bundles go a little way toward improving the situation, but not far enough.

I totally agree on the pipes concept. You should take a look at System Services on NeXT / OS X, which are a good step in the right direction. While streams of untyped bytes are fine for persistence, they are horrible for communication. Something trivial, like sorting the output of ls -l by file size (displayed in human-readable form) is insanely complicated on a UNIX shell relative to the complexity of what you are actually trying to achieve. If, rather than a set of lines of text, ls emitted an array of objects, then you would just sort them by the size attribute and pretty-print them. Depressingly, this was actually solved nicely in Smalltalk-76, where the Transcript window gave you exactly this kind of interaction.

Re:Hear Hear!

[drsmithy]

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Most of these things have been in MacOS and/or Windows (and/or others, like OS/2) since the mid-90s, if not longer.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it sounds more like Apple's Automator, which allows you to chain actions from one app to another.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Tacvek]

"What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done."

Hear Hear! Yes, I too am a little disappointed that the "zenith" of Free Software seems to be cloning the look and feel of Windows, which is cloning the Mac, etc.

What about some real ground-breaking stuff - how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Hell, why can't I just drag a file to a printer icon to print it? Why do I have to OPEN the file, then print it?

Somebody correct me If I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like you were just describing Plan 9 at the GUI layer.

I believe I remember reading that the desired UI paradigm was that save as worked by opening a window with an icon, what you dragged wherever you wanted the file to be. This was back before tabbed interfaces became common enough that the just dragging the a tab and dropping it resulting in a file made sense. There was no save dialog. equivlently one could just drag the dogument to the printer to print it, or to another application to open it without ever committing it to disk.

I cannot find a source for this now, so perhaps it was another fairly esoteric OS.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Tacvek]

True, but only in very limited ways. I just dragged a PDF file to my printer and it worked fine. The Acrobat program opened and closed visibly, but otherwise it just worked. I tried to drag a .cxx file to the printer (.cxx files are associated with Visual Studio on my system, as it is the only IDE on my system, even though I'm more like to compile a program with gcc and idit it with emacs) and I get message telling me that the program only supports printing to my default printer, and asking me if i want to change my default printer. That is obviously nonsense.

Worst of all was trying to drag a .docx file to the printer. The net result of that was that some other document I already had open in Microsoft Word 2007 being broaught to the front. Nothing was printed, no print dialog opened, the file in question was not opened, nothing.

Draging file to programs works reasonably often, but not always, sometime the program attempts to embed the file in the document I'm working on instead. Dragging to a folder is quite hit and miss. I just tried that with a PDF, and was surpsied to see it create an rtf file with the desired content in it. I did the same with the part of a word document and it decided to add it to my desktop as an Active Desktop item. A piece of short lived technology from windows 98, that had just enough demand behind it that Microsoft apparently ported it to XP. So I try again with a different part of the document, and it resulted in a "scrap" file, which is an old and long abondoned peice of Microsoft technology created back when OLE was first really coming out, intended for exactly that soft of purpose, but quickly abandoned by virtuall all products, except Office, since somebody may reply on that functionality.

Further in Windows all of these even when they do work are alternatives to the traditional flow, not replacements for them.

Re:Hear Hear!

[jisatsusha]

If, rather than a set of lines of text, ls emitted an array of objects, then you would just sort them by the size attribute and pretty-print them.

That's exactly what Windows PowerShell is designed to accomplish.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Something trivial, like sorting the output of ls -l by file size (displayed in human-readable form) is insanely complicated on a UNIX shell relative to the complexity of what you are actually trying to achieve.

ls -l | sort -n -k 2

Oh, the complexity!

Re:Hear Hear!

[jcr]

Automator is fine if what you want to do is a linear sequence. QC's approach is rather more flexible.

-jcr

Re:Hear Hear!

[jcr]

Oh, the complexity!

Great, so do you want to explain to the non-hackers in your office what that line does? Your example makes his point.

-jcr

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't: it refutes his point. The UNIX way is the opposite of complex. You need to list and sort by size. So you list and then sort the result by the size column. The problem is solved with nothing but very vanilla tools and options, in an entirely expected way. The reason why you cannot explain it to an office worker is that he has a Microsoft crayon lodged inside his brain. CLI is easy to learn: ls, cd, pwd, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, piping and basic globbing allow you to do pretty much anything a GUI can do. No one learns it precisely because Windows does not have the UNIX userland.

Most users do not know what a "file" is because Microsoft and Apple successfully shielded them from that dangerous knowledge, even though "a named stream of binary data" or "a named stream of numbers" is arguably easier to understand than any definition of a "document" one can come up with.

If, rather than a set of lines of text, ls emitted an array of objects, then you would just sort them by the size attribute and pretty-print them.

I can only assume that the poster is not familiar with awk, because that is exactly how the latter interprets the input by default. (I cannot help but to think that his deep dissatisfaction with the UNIX way stems mainly from his own ignorance.) So if one needs a file to be a grid of fields, one can read it with awk. The poster is wrong on two counts here: contrary to his opinion, one can read fields from files in UNIX, and it is actually not the best solution for a simple problem he posed.

Re:Hear Hear!

[jcr]

I can't tell if you're serious or a brilliant satirist.

-jcr

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I am all of that and much, much more.

Re:Hear Hear!

[TheSunborn]

But that only work if you want the output from ls -l
What if I want the output from just ls(Or more likely the output from ls -lh).

Oh and ls -l | sort -n -k 2 don't even work for me(On Fedora core 11) because it first sort by access rights and then owner.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

My bad, it is supposed to be

ls -l | sort -n -k 5

Re:Hear Hear!

[drsmithy]

True, but only in very limited ways.

But these are limitations imposed by the applications, not the OS. OSes support what you want quite well, and have for a very long time, but if applications don't make use of those features, there's not much the OS can do about it.

Re:Hear Hear!

[TheRaven64]

Sorry, no. I said in human-readable form, meaning with the sizes in B, KB, MB, or GB, depending on which is the most natural representation. You can get this output from ls with ls -h, but then you can't sort it with sort. You can sort it with awk, or you can use awk to convert put column two in human-readable form.

I just tried the command that you listed and it sorted by the link count of the file and displayed the sizes in disk allocation units (512 byte blocks on this system). So, you've created a command that is relatively (although not very) simple, but doesn't actually do what I asked. Very UNIX.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Something trivial, like sorting the output of ls -l by file size (displayed in human-readable form) is insanely complicated on a UNIX shell relative to the complexity of what you are actually trying to achieve.

ls -lS?

Re:Hear Hear!

[sim303]

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Hell, why can't I just drag a file to a printer icon to print it? Why do I have to OPEN the file, then print it?

See Acorn RISC OS, circa 1990.

Re:Hear Hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you should try crawling out of your ivory basement and ask your mom to do that. Yes, that command *is* complex and an unnatural way of interfacing with computers.

Hell why am I even responding to this drivel

Re:Hear Hear!

[carnalforge]

ls -lSh

Even shorter :)

Re:Hear Hear!

[Tacvek]

Yes and no. As far as I know windows style guidelines don't emphasize these ypes of features very much. They are also not very visible in the bul-in applications that come with the OS, while for example the common dialogs for file oipening and closing are. If the OS's built-in applications supported saving only by dragging to a folder for example, then that would become very obvious, and other applications would be sure to support it. If the only way to print was dragging a file or content to a printer icon, or if that meathod was shown in the built-in OS video tutorials, then it would be more likely to work in most applications.

If Microsoft was to to write to makers of the textbooks and state that dragging to the printer icons was the preferred method of printing in Windows 8, and requesting that this be the meathod emphasized, then application would follow along.

OS Paradigms like these are as much a function of support by most software as support in the Windows Manager, core libraries or kernel. If most mac app developers did not make sure that their applications could run from any folder, then that paradigm of MacOS, that apps are icons that can be put wherever desired and run from there would fail to be a MacOS paradigm.

Open Source commercial 'exploitation'? Fine!

[Alwin Henseler]

(..) but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.

And any true FOSS supporter should welcome that: whatever the motive of folks employing open source, as long as they do, they further general adoption of it.

Commercial exploitation of FOSS means incorporation into products, means equipment that adheres to standards (vs. closed protocols). It also means software reuse, less re-inventing of the wheel, and (ultimately) cheaper products because the manufacturer didn't waste money re-inventing those wheels. And products that are more valuable to end-users because of their open, commodity, standards-compliant properties. And if we're lucky, perhaps some promotion of the "share me" vs. the "it's mine!" philosophy, if end-users see that FOSS is being used.

That is all fine with me, even if the original motivation was cold, hard greed.

Not influential to me

[petrus4]

I either haven't heard of these people, or I don't care about them. Also, nearly everyone listed is either a CEO or board member of a corporation.

First, the hall of fame:-

• Eric Raymond. The Art of UNIX Programming has a permanently open tab in Firefox for me.

  "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates."
  -- Deuteronomy, 6:6

• Jordan Hubbard. He was the initial author of the ports system for FreeBSD. He was also, I believe, the leader of that project before going to work for Apple.
• Marshall Kirk McKusick. Author of both the first and second filesystems for FreeBSD, and designer of the Beastie mascot.
• Patrick Volkerding. He is the leader of the Slackware Linux project, which was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and still, I believe, the finest in existence.
• William and Lynn Jolitz. The co-authors of the 386BSD project, and in that sense, Computer Science's answer to the Curies.
• Bill Joy. Author of the original vi.
• Bram Moolenaar. Founder and maintainer of the Vim project.
• Gerard Beekmans. Founder of the Linux From Scratch project.
• Linus Torvalds. I don't need to mention who Linus is. However, I'm also not mentioning him purely because it is politically correct to do so. I mention him here because I've looked through the code of his 0.1 Linux release. Linux might be a bloated horror now, but back then, it was poetry.
• Bob Young, and Marc Ewing. The founders of Red Hat. Red Hat eventually abandoned the end user market for the enterprise sector, but they made a game try at creating an end user distribution first. Red Hat contributed a number of key programs to early Linux distributions, including the RPM package manager, and Anaconda hardware detection software. They also now largely fund the continued development of the GNU project.
• Ulrich Drepper. I will admit that I think Glibc is a bloated mess, but Ulrich displayed courage in once drawing attention to the megalomania of Richard Stallman. For that, I admire him.
• Daniel Robbins. Founder of both the Gentoo and Funtoo projects, and an awesome bash scripter.
• Theo de Raadt. Leader of the OpenBSD project. Theo is an individual who understands what both the correct philosophy and methods are, behind developing software, and is not afraid to continue to follow said beliefs, irrespective of the project's detractors. His manner might, at times, emulate that of Erin Brockovich, but I still admire him despite that, and believe that his intelligence is matched only by his tenacity.

And now, the hall of shame:-

• Richard Stallman. This is an individual who scarcely needs introduction on Slashdot, either; however I consider him the Magneto to Raymond's Xavier. The Free Software Foundation is the archetypical destructive cult, and Stallman has become as much a bane to Free and Open Source Software as he ever may have originally been a blessing. The savagery that I will likely be shown by his followers, for placing him here, will only further prove that point.
• Bradley Kuhn. He has stated that his ideal is a scenario where the GPL is the only FOSS license in existence.
• Ian Murdock. Founder of the Debian project, which is, after Stallman and his drone army, the single greatest source of emotional pain for me, where FOSS is concerned. His original intentions might have been good, but I continue to consider Debian a titanically bloated, excessively complex obscenity, in both technical and social terms. It is the worst Linux distributio

Re:Not influential to me

[petrus4]

I meant to say, of course, that the OP is my list, in both categories. ;)

Re:Not influential to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Code infrequently, carry a big axe.

Re:Not influential to me

[petrus4]

Code infrequently, carry a big axe.

What does this mean?

Re:Not influential to me

[TheRaven64]

I find it very hard to disagree with your list. I am not completely sure that I'd put Ian Murdock on the second list - most of the things you dislike about Debian seem to have collected later and he's done some good work on OpenSolaris that makes up for Debian. Marshall Kirk McKusick and Bill Joy both deserve to be near the top of the list for their respective achievements.

One person I'd add is Keith Packard. He doesn't get much press coverage, but he is largely responsible for the fact that X.org is now feature-competitive with Apple's Quartz. He's been involved with the project for a long time and has evolved the X system from a remote display system for 1-bit displays running multiple terminals to something with support for compositing, accelerated rendering, and so on. Most importantly, he's done this without sacrificing backwards compatibility and without hard-coding policy decisions into the display server. You can still fire up a xterm on a VAX running 4BSD (or whatever) today and display it on a handheld machine running Linux with X.org and have it render correctly. Only now the drawing commands will be sent to an off-screen buffer and then composited in the display server according to a policy decided by something complex like Compiz or something simple like xcompmgr. I can't think of any other project that has achieved that long a period of continual evolution without breaking (binary) compatibility or throwing away the entire codebase and starting again.

Re:Not influential to me

[petrus4]

One person I'd add is Keith Packard. He doesn't get much press coverage, but he is largely responsible for the fact that X.org is now feature-competitive with Apple's Quartz.

Yes, I haven't heard much mention of him either, I will admit. I'd heard the name, but that was about it.

Is he the Packard in the company name, "Hewlett Packard?"

Re:Not influential to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Walk softly and carry a big gun, of course.

Re:Not influential to me

[petrus4]

Walk softly and carry a big gun, of course.

I still don't understand; but then again, such is the nature of Anonymous Cowards, I suppose. They are mysterious creatures. ;)

Re:Not influential to me

[Vexorian]

I guess that you were modded insightful because you need to click "Read the rest of this comment" in order to read the incredibly nonsensical part of your post... Anyway, do notice that although "RMS is a zealot and an extremest that is a savage and a bane to Free and open source software" he and his likes have certainly not ever come close to show the sort of zealotry and biggotry in your post. I wonder if you are even conscious of the extremism you are showing by calling people "drones" or flaming debian like a typical fanboy of whatever Linux distro/*BSD you prefer. It is the lack of maturity and being able to accept the contribution of others in your likes that ultimately drives people away from Open source/free software. By your childish statements you have shown a level of zealotry that beats the likes of RMS and Bruce Perens, congratulations.

Re:Not influential to me

[Vexorian]

I mean for god's sake, you included a person in that list nto because of his valuable contribution that is glibc but because he attacked RMS. How non-ideologist of you.

Re:Not influential to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on mods. This is the same guy who just claimed he intimately knows glibc, linux kernel (current and 0.1!), GNOME and Debian. Now he's telling you he has no idea who Keith P is. Who here thinks that's more probable than petrus4 making shit up and trolling us all?

Re:Not influential to me

[petrus4]

I said I'd heard the name. I also don't follow X intimately at all.

I'm not omniscient, ya know. ;)

Re:Not influential to me

[alfino]

You think Debian is the worst? Don't use it then. Idiot.

Not OSS list

[tokul]

Top 4 are not open source. They only run commercial companies that have sidekick OSS products. Their main products are commercial ones. Those people are not OSS developers. You might ask them questions about open source only if you want business related answers about open source and even then you might not get any viable business answer.

Honorable Mentions - Scott Mcnealy, Sun Microsystems. WTF?

Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board members.

[Vellmont]

Take a quick look at the people in the article:

http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2009/10/27/most-influential-people-in-open-source/

Now take a quick look at the people on their board (scroll to bottom).

http://www.mindtouch.com/About_MindTouch
Notice any two names and pictures in common, like say the top two ranked people in the article?

Now, I guess you could think "Wow! these guys must really be a great company since they have the TOP TWO OSS influencers on their board!". A less naive person might have some other thoughts on that.

This article is little more than marketing masquerading as news. It was written by the companies sales guy. The reason why nobody has ever heard of these people is that the article isn't about actual people of influence, it's an attempt to sell a product.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Roebot]

Get your tin foil hats out.

If you look at the boards of the top 25 open source boards you'll find many of these people on the list present. I'd say this is likely a significant factor in establishing these folks as the 2009 Most Influential Open Source Executives? Wouldn't you?

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Vellmont]

I'd say this is likely a significant factor in establishing these folks as the 2009 Most Influential Open Source Executives?

Maybe. But your article wasn't titled Most Influential Open Source Executives. It was Most Influential People. Or are you saying that only executives are people?

List grossly misses the point

[blind biker]

..and the point of open source is a number of people offering their source code to everyone. These people are the source of "open source", and the names on that list don't resonate with that crowd, hence they are not influential. The list should include notable (and leading) contributors to such project as Firefox, Linux, Net/Open/FreeBSD, OpenOffice, SAMBA, Wine, OpenSolaris, etc. (I am sure I missed a lot of important OS projects, please do forgive me in advance).

It's just another case of epitomizing the managers over the engineers - yes, it's a cliche, but it fits. Managers just can't seem to be satisfied with raking in the most dough - they need the kick of fame, too, even though in the OS world they are the least relevant - remember, cathedral vs. bazaar.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Roebot]

"This list of the top influential Executives of the 2009..."

I can haz literazi? ;-)

News for Businessmen, Not for Nerds

[progliberty]

This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these corporate priests.

Re:News for Businessmen, Not for Nerds

[MyLongNickName]

Put down the bong, dude.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Anonymous Coward]

The company is a marketing company with a product that provides nebulous benefits (it's a pimped-out wiki)

Matt Asay?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the guy who claims he is an open source legal expert and doesn't know the difference between copyright and patents?

Joey Ferwerda

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is Ton Roosendaal from the Blender Foundation!
His look on Open Source and Open Contend changed everything for good!

Blender is now a well used alternative in the industry.
Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny are the only open movies right now, and used a lot for studies.
Yo Frankie!, is one of the only open games that is used as base for a lot of starting developers.

Where is Ton, the best open source CEO ever!

Slashdot power to the rescue!

[openfrog]

WTF indeed. Let the Slashdot community make a better list. Beginning with some suggestions from TFA (I admit I actually, you know, read it...) comments

Richard Stallman
Linus Torvalds
Eric S. Raymond
Bruce Perens
Tim O’Reilly

  Also
Bob Young & Marc Ewing (Red Hat founders) and
Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders)

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[Blakey Rat]

Me.

Make sure I'm on the list. Me me me.

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[pallmall1]

I think Pamela Jones (PJ) of Groklaw should be mentioned.

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

PJ is more of a ABMer than an Open Source person.

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[Ash Vince]

I hope you do not think Richard Stallman actually encourages anyone to adopt open source? He drives people away from it with his complete lack of any personal hygiene and fanaticism. People like Torvalds and Perens do belong on such a list in my opinion as they are far more pragmatic and actually encourage its adoption.

Part of this encouragement in the case of Linus is his stance on kernel development. He is very reluctant to include changes that will adversely effect any subset of its current users. While Linux occasional non-responsiveness on the desktop has been annoying to me at times, the fact that behind the scenes processing running as root can take priority does make perfect sense when I have my server admin hat on.

Bruce Perens similarly has been an excellent proponent of Linux for many years while also maintaining a level headed approach. This is most evident by looking at the list of organisations that have paid to hear his point of view.

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[openfrog]

If you trust Bruce Perens, as you obviously do as much as I, believe him when he says (and he insists on it) that without Richard Stallman and the GPL license, there would be no open source community to speak of. It would be a desertic proprietary corporate landscape all around. Stallman's is the single most important and influential contribution to the community, its very foundation. Everyone recognizes it. Where do you come from?

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[sqldr]

That guy who put that bug in debian's openssl package (which went downstream to ubuntu, et all) making any certificate generated on debian/ubuntu completely insecure, resulting in thousands upon thousands of open source users flooding verisign et all with even more thousands of certificate update requests and a huge international security headache.

I'd say he was pretty influential.. he ruined nearly my entire week :-)

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[tsa]

Linux may not have made it to the desktop, but isn't Linux on your phone (Android, Maemo) way cooler? Who ever thought of that in 1995, when Linux on the desktop was just around the corner! Linux on the phone was never just around the corner; it was just there when needed!

Re:Slashdot power to the rescue!

[Ash Vince]

Linux may not have made it to the desktop, but isn't Linux on your phone (Android, Maemo) way cooler? Who ever thought of that in 1995, when Linux on the desktop was just around the corner! Linux on the phone was never just around the corner; it was just there when needed!

Yup, that is spot on. I have just bought myself a Hero and you can tell it runs the same interface they used to use running under Windows Mobile but it runs way smoother under android. I know it has its glitches, but it has achieved in version 1.4 what windows mobile has not managed in version 6.1.

Steve Ballmer

[n3v]

Because M$ sucks!

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[openfrog]

Maybe. But your article wasn't titled Most Influential Open Source Executives. It was Most Influential People. Or are you saying that only executives are people?

If only I had modpoints for the parent...: Vellmont is right on the money on the article's motivation. Someone (Roebot) hastes to make a sarcastic rebuttal. Vellmont answers saying "But your (emphasis mine) article wasn't titled...", Roebot replies with yet more sarcasm, without bothering to add a denial about the 'your article'.

  He may yet not be the actual author, but the fact that he does not care to deny it tells me something about his mindset...

Re:This list is disappointing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a list of white male millionaires. Classy.

Yes, they are.

Does that prove that white males are the only ones who have the guts to make a difference?

Re:Influential Women - reading comprehension

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that the subject title for the comment was "Influential Women" as in here is a woman that could(should) be on this list. The Mindtouch blog even noted itself that

Notably absent however are any influential women.

No the GP wasn't saying that Leslie is "the most influential open source leader out there" instead they were offering her as an example of an influential woman in the open source movement.

Or to put is simply - you failed at reading comprehension.

Re:Or to have it pre-installed on their new comput

[snikulin]

This is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. :P

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Anonymous Coward]

Tin foil hats... out?? Mine is where it should have been for everyone else for the past 35 years ... On my HEAD. And that's where I likes it.

Dries? WTF?

[message144]

This guy created the huge sloppy mess that is Drupal. I suppose it may have been influential in that it has influenced developers to look for more mature, well-planned, scalable solutions. Drupal is hardly something the open source community should be proud of.

Women?

[JAlexoi]

Let us just have reality take over. How many women do you know that will "work" after work? None of my colleagues are willing or even think about work after 5. None of men, that stop work at 5 are ever promoted. The reason that women are out of the list, is because they "have better things to do in their lives". Like watching the next episode of some soap opera or do gardening. I am however sorry for those women that have to work double(and sacrifice double) to overcome the fact, that most of their "sisters" are exactly the opposite.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Mitchell Baker?

[Trip6]

Firefox has had over a billion downloads - that's not influential??

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Roebot]

No I am not the author. I'm Aaron Fulkerson. Mark Fidelman was the author. I am a MindToucher though :). I thought that was obvious from my other posts.

When I posted my previous post, yes sarcastic, I didn't realize Vellmont had already quoted the fact this list was of "top influential execs" of open source as defined by 50 something exects from 25+ open source companies. My bad.

My post and reading was brief bc I had my darling 3 year old to take to Seaworld. :-)

Y'arrr!

[johngineer]

Not a looker in the bunch! (sorry, but it had to be said -- also, this list is a sausage-fest)

influential Dutch

[Errtu76]

Bram Moolenaar (vim)
Wietse Venema (postfix)
Guido van Rossum (python)
Stephen R. van den Berg (procmail)

Not the smallest programs either. Yeah i'm proud of my country :)

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[koiransuklaa]

Excuse me? You are giving out the impression that your small company somehow managed to grab not one but two most influential people in the open source business. Sorry, but the odds are against you: it's Occam's razor you need to fight here, not tin foil hats. Now, I know you are saying this isn't just your opinion but a survey. There are two things that make this article still smell very, very fishy:

1. You do not say anything about the possible biases your research may have. Anyone with a clue will be able to guess that the sample selection is probably biased to include people involved with MindTouch, Augustin and Asay, but we just don't know. If your sample was "people who responded to the last blog post"... well, that would explain a few things.

2. You never disclose your relationship with Asay and Augustin in the article. Even if your research was sound it would be the right thing to do. Isn't this basic journalism?

I doubt you can just explain this away.

Racism?

[Grendel Drago]

I'd estimate at some point after the racism, but before the terrorist paranoia.

Wait, what? I thought that ESR's "I'm not a racist because I don't think I'm a racist" racism followed from his libertarian-flavored neoconservative ideology. Did he say or do something obnoxiously racist before 9/11?

Re:Racism?

[nomadic]

Wait, what? I thought that ESR's "I'm not a racist because I don't think I'm a racist" racism followed from his libertarian-flavored neoconservative ideology. Did he say or do something obnoxiously racist before 9/11?

Hmm, actually I may be getting my chronology wrong, maybe the terrorist paranoia came before the racism. Though I'm sure he probably did have the racist views prior to 9/11 because I remember some of the garbage he was spouting on Usenet in the early 2000s (which had nothing to do with terrorists, so I would assume he had those beliefs for a while). He, coincidentally enough, did construct a very narrow definition of racism in that thread in order to show he wasn't, his statement that white people were on the average smarter than black people notwithstanding.

Of course, the last writing of his that I got any use out of was his nethack manual back in the late 80s/early 90s or whenever that was, so I could very well have my chronology off.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[fm6]

Another issue with MindTouch: it's a little hypocritical of them to boast about their role in the OS community. You won't find their source code repository without resorting to Google.

Mind you, it's perfectly legitimate to monetize an OS product by building a commercial product around it. But there's more to being Open Source than honoring the letter of your OS-friendly license. It's about engaging with a community of OS developers. Without that, you're just a proprietary vendor that happens to publish some of your source code.

Take a breath

[openfrog]

That guy who put that bug in debian's openssl package (...)

I'd say he was pretty influential.. he ruined nearly my entire week :-)

An entire week? Well that's an annoyance for sure, but console yourself and take a larger view: a couple of days ago here on Slashdot and elsewhere, we were just discussing Microsoft's lost decade.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Roebot]

Survey? Correct 50 votes from 25 _companies_. Zimbra, MySQL, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Groundworks, Acquia etc... Note: they couldn't vote for ppl from their own company.

As for me managing to convince two highly sought after individuals to advise MindTouch, :-) I can be very convincing.

1. Recall, in the blog post, it clearly describes the sample population. Again in the comments I write about bias and bemoan the lack of women. This is a HUGE problem in open source! It's a problem in tech as a whole, but OS has an even worse problem. Why? I really don't know and I really don't know how to correct this.

Anyway, do you think OSS execs will provide a list distinct from /.ers? Of course. However, I think the suggestions provided here by ./ers are largely disappointing. It's the same 'ol folks. Some of which haven't made significant contributions for many years--YES, they are the pioneers and I'm not discounting this--but this was emphatically a list for *today*.

Here are some folks I would expect ./ers to suggest:
* Eben Moglen (I'm shocked no one has mentioned him)
* Lilly or other Mozillans
* Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski (not a mention!?!)
* Guido van Rossum
* Justin Erenkrantz
* Miguel de Icaza (received only a negative mention I believe)
* Simon Crosby
* Shuttleworth has had several mentions (also was mentioned in the survey), but what about other folks from Canonical/Ubuntu?

2. Mark didn't mention that Matt and Larry being on our advisory board bc he thought it would seem too cheesy/salesy. "YAAAY look at us!" You could be right about disclosing this. If we were real journos/bloggers we would.

The reality of this list is that the people listed here have all made significanat and postive impacts to all 25+ companies surveyed and execs from these companies percieve them to have be influential. For me, there weren't many surprises on the list.

Re:Top two "influencers" are MIndtouch board membe

[Roebot]

It's easy to find MindTouch source code: http://www.mindtouch.com/Download

However, you're correct about the repo. It is really hard to find. I'll get it added to: http://www.mindtouch.com/community and http://developer.mindtouch.com/

Thanks for the heads up.