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

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.

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!

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: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?

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!

[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.

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

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: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.

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.

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)