Unsung Heroes of Open Source Software? 601
Yaztromo asks: "Sometimes, as an Open Source Software developer, I wonder if anyone out there is actually noticing the contributions I make to the software they're running. This got me thinking today -- how many Open Source Software packages am I running without knowing or applauding those who toiled in the background to developed them? We all know about personalities like Richard M. Stallman and Linus Torvalds, but there are a lot of unsung heroes of Open Source out there whose names may not be on the tips of everyones tongues. But perhaps they should be. They may be wizard coders, or amazing project administrators, or they provide fantastic support. Maybe they do all three, and more. Or maybe they're the person in your organization who pushed an Open Source solution in the face of an entrenched closed-source solution, and won. Or the one who printed up a whole spindle of Knoppix CD's and handed them out at a user group meeting.
So here's you chance: who is your favorite unsung hero of Open Source Software, and why?"
Don't just mention them... nominate them (Score:5, Informative)
Voting will soon get underway for Q3 winners so get nominating!
John.
Eric Andreychek (Score:5, Informative)
Gene Spafford (Score:5, Informative)
The Samba Team (Score:5, Informative)
Definately Roland "Blood-bath" McGrath (Score:5, Informative)
Also a very cool, unassuming guy.
Red Demon (Score:3, Informative)
Donald Becker (Score:5, Informative)
It may not seem relevant now, but there was a time when you had to hunt around for a linux-compatable ethernet driver.
Larry Jones & Mark Baushke, CVS mailing list g (Score:5, Informative)
All the more kudos go to these guys since CVS is slowly being superceded by Subversion; Derek, Larry, and Mark are essentially doing the thankless job of legacy tech support.
I don't know that he's so much a hero, but (Score:3, Informative)
Sven Guckes (Score:2, Informative)
Myk Melez, for Forumzilla (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Definately Roland "Blood-bath" McGrath (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Samba Team (Score:2, Informative)
Samba, rsync, ccache(? - possibly wrong on that). I love him and I want his babies.
List all them? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe some of the unsung heroes really like to remain unsung. And we all just see the PR guys in front of it.
I could list some of guys in the front of it, but I would let a lot of people that really deserve the credits because of it.
Tim Ney (X.org), Keith Packard (Eye-candy master), Havoc Pennington (DBUS hacker), Jeff Waugh (one of the guys behind the change of GNOME), Owen Tayler (GTK maintainer), Guido Von Rossum (Python).
Also all the Mozilla people, all the GCC people, all the Apache people, all the PHP people, all the people I left out in the GNOME project, all the people I left out in the Python project.
I could go on and on and on and would not list everyone that really deserves. Just expanding the people in the "All the foo project" listed above would create a really big list.
http://66.35.250.150 anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
- technical architect of DNS/BIND
- founder of the ISC (Internet Software Consortium)
- cofounder of MAPS (blackhole)
- CIX router ace & CIX-W maintainer
and many others.
Re:Heros? Check ego at door! (Score:3, Informative)
OSS developers survey [berlios.de]
Nomination (Score:2, Informative)
Contributions to rhythmbox and driving force behind gnomesupport.org
Some I can think of (Score:5, Informative)
The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate [kde.org], KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.
Ward Cunningham [c2.com], the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams [usemod.com], the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki [usemod.com].
Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop [kuro5hin.org], Drupal [drupal.org] and Slash [slashcode.com], respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender [blender.org] team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.
Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE [sourceforge.net], for exploring new ways to discover free music.
Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API [xmlrpc.com] and the XML-RPC protocol.
Keith Packard [keithp.com] of HP for his many improvements to X.
Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.
And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.
Re:I wish they'd had this sooner. (Score:4, Informative)
A google reveals this snippet too The Alderson Drive [wikiverse.org]
Re:cjk input (Score:2, Informative)
Without them, Linux/*BSD would never have been as popular in Japan as they are now.
Of course, since they're pretty vital pieces of functionality, you could take the view that somebody would have written a similar program if they didn't exist... but these guys actually did it.
For the record, they are (list incomplete and in no particular order):
Aida Shinra
Kanou Hiroki
Zukeran Shin
Takamizu Toru
Akira Kon
Sugai Masaru
Ryuichi Tamano
Misao Yuko
Nakano Shuji
Ishisone Makoto
Suzuki Naoshi
Luis Villa (Score:1, Informative)
Bug fixing aint sexy but it is very very necessary.
Re:wtf? (Score:2, Informative)
rei:/home/iwarford# dmesg | grep -i becker
ne2k-pci.c:v1.02 10/19/2000 D. Becker/P. Gortmaker
via-rhine.c:v1.10-LK1.1.13 Nov-17-2001 Written by Donald Becker
Comments are printed out sometimes.
Re:Bill Gates... (Score:3, Informative)
Atleast according to this book [oreilly.com], it was a printer by Xerox, that ultimately led RMS to *start* the F/OSS movement
Re:DO NOT CLICK- DISGUSTING IMAGE (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Donald Becker (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Donald Becker (Score:4, Informative)
If you want "unsung heros", I'd look elsewhere. (In the same space, Bill Paul of FreeBSD has my vote - more drivers, better code quality. That's my opinion from having hacked the code of drivers from both. But Bill has also gotten a fair amount of public recognition, especially after his Project Evil - supporting NDIS drivers on FreeBSD.)
Eivind.
Paul Vixie (Score:3, Informative)
He's friendly to newbie strangers, too (Score:5, Informative)
John W. Eaton (Score:4, Informative)
Gerard Beekmans (Score:4, Informative)
Embedded Guru (Score:5, Informative)
Re:too much freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.
While RMS did code gcc in the beginning, I don't feel one should give RMS credit for what it is today.
The GCC that RMS developed was IMHO amateurish. It was primarily the work done by the people at Cygnus (now Red Hat) who turned GCC into the quality real-world compiler it is today.
Not to mention that RMS opposed this. He opposed including C++ support, and then opposed supporting it properly, causing the Cygnus ecgs fork.
(which is now gcc again, since everybody else finally overruled RMS)
As for Linux, RMS spent a good amount of time back then actively discouraging people from contributing to Linux.. talking about the vaporware Hurd would be so much better and how it was all wasted effort.
I'd agree we owe a lot to RMS, but not with respect to GCC and Linux. The positive contributions he's made with respect to those two have been cancelled out by his counter-productive dogmatism.
(Even today, it continues. Many, if not most, GCC developers currently want to re-write parts of the front-end in C++. There are good technical arguments for this, and it's been shown that some code can be simplified greatly that way.
While most of the GCC steering committe recently said, "OK, well if you can show there are benifits, we're open to the idea". Except RMS who was STRONGLY against the idea. Not for any ideological reason, but simply because RMS doesn't like C++.
That is simply just terrible leadership.
Re:The Samba Team (Score:4, Informative)
In my mind, though, the unsung heroes are the ones who toil for hours on end working on projects that a dozen or a few hundred people use. I'd like to give kudos to a few of them.
Here's a couple of teams:
Michael Sweet (Score:2, Informative)
Gerd Knorr. . . (Score:2, Informative)
Thanks Gerd! (http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/bttv.html) for anyone interested in the driver
Re:A True Open Source Hero is... (Score:3, Informative)
I appreciate the sentiment, but this has nothing to do with open source software. This is quoted from "An Open Letter To Hobbyists" [google.com], something BG wrote to complain about the fact that people were pirating MS BASIC for the Altair back in 1976.
Re:Henry Spencer (Score:2, Informative)
While we're at it in the newsfroups department, let's add Vernon Shryver, Paul Vixie, Tony Li,
Dan Bernstein, and of course, Kibo.
For code and cluefulness, Wietse Venema.
The Devs behind OpenZaurus / Opie (Score:2, Informative)
Not even giving up in times when fewer and fewer devs contribute to the projects.
They made the Zauri to the killer machines they are today.
Way to go guys!
Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen (Score:5, Informative)
Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen
Bet you don't know what they did. They wanted good software for producing high quality music notation layouts. So they wrote it. And, thankfully, they made it free software to share with the world, so the next person who wanted good software for producing high quality music notation layouts could use what they had and improve on it instead of starting over.
The result is GNU Lilypond [lilypond.org]. Currently it performs better than proprietary alternatives like Finale, but the interface is still text-based. But musicians tend to feel it does a superior layout job.
If the guy who I had an email conversation with awhile back manages to get the Aiken 7-shape shaped note system implemented for Lilypond, I'll sing his name, too.
Re:The Samba Team (Score:2, Informative)
I was as Linux.conf.au [linux.org.au] and saw him sit down with a complete newbie who would have been maybe 17 years old. This guy was interested in writing some code for the AI competition that was running at the conference, but didn't seem to have much of a clue about how to start it off, let alone coding anything competetive.
Tridge, out of the blue [ibm.com] began an informal AI 101 lesson in the courtyard. I sat in on it and can honestly say I learnt more about AI in 10 minutes with Tridge then I did in four years of a CS degree. His presentation of the material came so fluently, confidently and with a warm manner.
So, I nominate him for his *general* donation to the OS movement, and not for his Samba developments (though they are fantastic). It's because of people like him that others want to get involved and make a difference too, and that's the biggest influence we could ever want.
Re:Theo DeRaadt.... (Score:3, Informative)
mitchell baker of Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know nearly as many people as I should and I certainly haven't done enough to thank or otherwise praise many of the open source contributors who have been giving to projects, large and small, that I use every day. This topic has prompted me to start looking a little bit closer.
There is one person I do know who has had a huge impact on the entire open source world as well as my open source continent (Mozilla) that doesn't get the recognition she deserves.
Michell Baker [mozillazine.org] of the Mozilla Foundation is definitely a hero. The author of the MPL and the Chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla project, she has been a driving force behind the Mozilla projects since the beginning. Without Mitchell, Mozilla just wouldn't be where it is today.
--Asa
Re:too much freedom? (Score:1, Informative)