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

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?

[Radtoo]

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

Re:WTF?

[TheRaven64]

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

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"?

[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"?

[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.

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

[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.

Linus Torvalds is missing....

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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

Slashdotted

[eln]

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

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

[Vexorian]

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

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

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: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.

But what about...

[lucm]

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

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

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!

[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!

[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: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.

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

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.

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.

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)