Unsung Heroes of Open Source Software?

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?"

"Everyone"

[SilentChris]

"unsung heroes of Open Source out there whose names may not be on the tips of everyones tongues"

Define "everyone". Ask mom who Bill Gates is and she'll probably know. Ask mom who Linus Torvalds is and expect a blank stare.

Some people may not like this selection...

[Anonymous Coward]

Branden Robinson and Debian's X Strike Force.

For all the crap I'm sure he's had to put up with, I gotta give him props for his effort. Thanks, Branden!

Donald Becker

[nhtshot]

cd /usr/src/linux
cat $(find ./) |grep Donald Becker

or even
dmesg |grep Donald Becker

Just in /drivers there are 232 comments with his name.

umm

[dotslasher_sri]

umm, the users : )

Re:Russ Nelson

[tcopeland]

> I hesitated for about two seconds
> before nominating myself.

I second this nomination - Russ helps lots of people out on the QMail mailing lists. Props!

WGET!!!

[cexshun]

Hrvoje Niksic
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!

Re:Bram Moolenaar...

[jobsagoodun]

Stallman wrote GCC and an editor thingy called emacs which suffers from not being vim!

Re:Closed source devs?

[stratjakt]

Why's that flamebait?

Most of the most brilliant programmers out there did it for a paycheck every week.

Is the guy who wrote mIRC less worthy of respect than the guy who maintains X-chat? At least he was smart enough to be able to make a carreer out of his hobby, and is the guy most responsible for the popularity of IRC in the first place.

Re:A True Open Source Hero is...

[seizure]

perhaps you have forgotten what gates wrote in his open letter to Hobbiyists

".As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.........Most directly, the thing you do is theft."

Jim WIlkinson

[rumblin'rabbit]

I've read articles saying how the Open Source movement started in the early 1990's, or some such blather. But numerical analysts have been putting software into the public domain for almost 5 decades. The ACM, for example, have been publishing code since 1960. And look at LAPACK, EisPack, SparSpak, and no and on and on. And the tradition continues to this day.

Okay, want a name? How about Jim Wilkinson one of the fathers of modern numerical computation. Maybe not unsung, example, but perhaps unknown to most /.'s.

Re:Closed source devs?

[techno-vampire]

Yes, they deserve our respect, but they get their reward in the money we pay for their work. If you want to get them some public kudos, why not submit an article asking for their names?

I vote for Bill Joy

[callipygian-showsyst]

I think Bill Joy [wikipedia.org] deserves more credit than he gets. After all, he invented "vi" [wikipedia.org], part of the FreeBSD release. Without vi, no source code would ever have been written!

Re:too much freedom?

[Skiron]

Yes, one of RMS's weaker moments, but if it wasn't for RMS and GCC, I doubt any of us would have any free software at all.

RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.

We all owe the man one hell of a lot.

john carmack

[big daddy kane]

although his influence on open source in general may not be as large as some of the heavy hitters, he not only opensources his engines after they become less liscensed, but also supports the open source graphics libary, open gl.

Question:

[GeckoX]

Why pose this question towards Open Source developers only?

Seriously, do all of the other developers out there already get enough credit? I'm pretty sure that for the most part, Open Source developers are already MUCH more visible than your average closed-source developer.

I'm certainly not attempting to detract from OS developers, but I really don't see the point in drawing a line here except to open up some sort of this camp is better than that camp can of worms.

Notably absent from the discussion so far

[doublegauss]

Don Knuth Apart from nurturing countless computer scientists with The Art of Computer Programming, he donated TeX to the world, which would be enough by itself to grant the man perennial kudos.

Larry Wall We probably wouldn't have had the Web as we know it without Perl (we wouldn't have had Perl vs Python flamewars either, though).

Everyone who ever contributed to Jakarta projects

[gorbachev]

The different Jakarta and/or Apache projects are such a valuable resource I can't even begin to evaluate the amount of time and money I've saved over the years using them.

Most of the applications I'm maintaining on a daily basis use multiple Jakarta Commons components and run on Tomcat. The quality of support from the community far exceeds the quality of support we get for most of our commercial components / products.

Re:Donald Becker

[redhog]

Except his code is unreadable with numerical constans everywhere and no comments. Not that he's bad at what he's doing - the code _works_ damn good, but it can't be used as documentation for the cards, and there is usually no other doc for them :(

Sam Lantingna libsdl

[stonewolf]

The number one thing holding back Linux on the desktop. The number one person doing something about that is Sam Lantinga. Aside from creating LibSDL, he has helped create a huge, growing, active community that has grown up around LibSDL. They are developing games with LibSDL on pretty much anything that can run a program and porting it to everything else.

Stonewolf

www.stonewolf.net

Re:John Levon, the LyX Qt don, gets my nod

[Hatta]

Let's not forget Donald Knuth for TeX which powers it all, and Leslie Lamport for the LaTeX macros. And of course, Bram Moolenaar for my preferred authoring environment [vim.org].

Also cheers to the folks [r-project.org] behind EMBOSS and those [r-project.org] behind the R project. Wayne Rasband for ImageJ, and all responsible [inria.fr] for SciLab. Thanks to everyone for making science (more) fun. :)

Darl

[Anonymous Coward]

for bringing the Weakest... Case... Ever... against the GPL; and increasing Linux awareness for all Business Executives where it was needed the most.

Re:Notably absent from the discussion so far

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you can call Knuth or Wall "unsung." Or Linus, or RMS, &c.

Theo DeRaadt....

[Mhrmnhrm]

for being an absolute ass when it comes to maintaining license simplicity, source purity, security paranoia, and funny looking pufferfish.

Henry Spencer

[doom]

I hereby suggest for your consideration Henry Spencer, only in part for the open source code that he's written -- he was the author of a popular regular expression library, for example. The really massive contribution that Henry Spencer has made, in my opinion is *informed commentary*. He's spent decades hanging around in the C programming newsgroups (not to mention the sci.space.* tree) answering questions intelligently. This is the kind of contribution that I think gets ignored far too often... yes great coders deserve to be honored, but people willing to educate and to do it for free on a volunteer basis, and *do a good job of it* are if anything even rarer.

Tim Berners-Lee

[an_mo]

I am somewhat amazed by how unknown he is to the general public, at least compared to Linus.

The whole GNU team

[zoeblade]

Isn't this why RMS insists on calling it GNU/Linux: so that the many people who contributed to the GNU part are in some way appreciated, rather than everyone looking solely to Linus "Linux" Torvalds?

It won't work, though. Every successful band, pretty much, has one person fronting it, and it's the same principle. People find it easier to focus their gratitude on just one person.

Re:A True Open Source Hero is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Credit where credit is due...

to Xeroc PARC, whose interface Steve Jobs cloned!

List only one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't know where to begin. OpenSource software is what allowed me to build my business and thus work from home instead of a corporate office, be home when my kids get home from school everyday, take vacations when I want, and basically de-stress my entire life and probably saved me from a stress related heart attack in 20 years. ...And that wasn't one program, it was everything from the big ones like Apache and Linux down through to the rinky dink little industry specific one-up tools I've used here and there to make life easier. So - a bit OT, but a good time to thank *everyone* who's pumping out OS software, including those that do the tiny unseen stuff. You don't know me, I don't know you and we'll never meet. But the total OS effect that you're a part of has drastically and directly improved my life. And I'm not alone by any stretch. (By contrast, MS hasn't done anything for me though I'm hoping for a check in the mail).

off the top of my head...

[Siva]

• Jörg Schilling [fokus.gmd.de], cdrtools
  
• Donald Becker [beowulf.org], linux ethernet drivers, Beowulf
  
• thekonst [thekonst.net], centericq (a console IM client)
  
• Alan Cox [linux.org.uk], linux kernel guru (I hate that word, but it fits), including being the primary maintainer of the 2.2 tree
  
• Paul Vixie [vix.com], Vixie cron, BIND, ISC [isc.org]

Re:WGET!!!

[dublin]

Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!

I'd have to go with Daniel Stenberg of cURL fame in this category. If you are still using wget, then try cURL [curl.haxx.se]. A lot of people only know wget, and that's a shame, because cURL is better in almost every possible dimension: see the table comparing cURL to wget and others [curl.haxx.se] to see for yourself. Not only that, but cURL is much more actively maintained and improved than wget.

While wget isn't a bad place to start, it's good to know there is a far more powerful alternative out there.

And, of course, it's part of far more than just Linux desktops - Apple even saw fit to make it part of OS X, and I routinely use it on XP, my own desktop OS of choice, as well several Linux and BSD-based servers.

It's an incredibly useful and valuable piece of code, and will become even more so in the future...

Re:too much freedom?

[xgamer04]

Not for any ideological reason, but simply because RMS doesn't like C++.

If not liking something is not ideological, I don't know what is.

Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them

[zonker]

i think folks that write documentation for open source projects are often unsung. think of all of the documentation that exists for projects like linux, apache, perl, etc. these projects wouldn't be nearly as useful if there wasn't good documentation for them.

documentation is one of those non-sexy aspects of open source that is often the hardest part to find someone to get it done, and even harder to get done in a way normal folks can understand. tech oriented folks, like programmers, often have a hard time communicating complex ideas to non-tech folks in a usable form.

fortunately, i know my work was well appreciated and helped lots of folks out with questions via the faq (i wrote lots of the documentation for the earlier versions of popfile). sadly, i lack the free time these days to continue working on the popfile project, but i'm proud to see lots of my work on the faq living on in the wiki and extended by others. btw, there's a new release of popfile [sf.net] today, thanks john & team! :)

What about me?

[drsquare]

I have contributed hundreds of thousands of lines to open source software, including x.org, glibc, the linux kernel, as well as doing tons to promote Linux usage in the UK. In fact, in the last two years I've gotten Linux onto around 200,000 computers across the country through my advocacy and consultancy. Just because I'm not mentioned in every other slashdot thread doesn't mean I'm not doing anything! Can't I get some recognition for my hard work please?

Re:"Everyone"

[LauraLolly]

Ask Mom who Linus is...
She sees the poster on the door to our workroom. She talks over whether 0S X is secure enough, and asks my Dad if he thinks they can harden both of their Macs.

She uses Open Office, and Mozilla. I think my mom knows what Open Source is.

One more thing. My mom is 73. My dad is 77. Never never never allow anyone to use the line about old dogs and new tricks in relation to computers.

The esoteric OSS projects

[ndogg]

I think it is the developers of the little known OSS projects that are still being worked on simply due to the love they have for their projects that are the true unsung heroes of OSS.

Contrary to what some believe about innovation within OSS, innovation does happen. The problem is that innovative and unique projects within the OSS arena get little to no fanfare, and are thusly ignored. When an OSS project develops functionality similar in nature to a closed, proprietary software package, it may well receive much attention and fanfare because people are familiar with the functionality, and with the OSS project, they are given an alternative. With something new, there is no marketing money behind it, and so no one knows about it, and no one is looking for it.

For example, FrogJam [frogjam.com] was developed completely independantly, and from what I know, the original developer, plat, had no knowledge of anything even remotely similar to it when he conceived of the idea. He continues to work on it to this day for the love of it, even though he's the only person really working on it (despite what the developer's page says.)

Rethink the 'About MyApp' Dialog

[Saeger]

Nobody's said this yet (in a +4), but the easiest and most visible way for the unsung devs to get some credit would be rethink how the 'Help > About' dialog was layed out, and when it's displayed.

So, put your goofiest team headshots in there, bio, paypal links, blinken lights, ... whatever. That's the easiest way to get more credit where credit is due, if that's what you're after. As opposed to "Written by Joe Schmoe in 1999. Humble pie documentation by John Smith.".

Also, on app startup, it's wouldn't be such a bad idea to display an about-random-developer splash page for a couple seconds. If people REALLY don't care, they can just disable the splash as you can in most apps.

Obviously, this works best in client apps moreso than background daemons and such.

--

Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them

[arkanes]

The testers and code auditors and everyone else who does the un-fun work that doesn't add features but instead makes sure that the code works for other people and that it stays in that condition. And I think the packagers, the ones who write the installation scripts and generally make software easy to use and easy to install also deserve a lot of credit.

A lot of important stuff is often not visible

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Software that provides user-visible features is easy to identify and nominate, but there's a slew of very important and useful OS-level stuff that is invisible and "just works". This kind of software only becomes visible when it breaks.

As an example, one area that I have been involved with is flash file system storage. Flash file systems underpin a slew of embedded and mobile applications (PDAs, phones, television sets,....). A reliable flash file system is a very valuable chunk of code that is invisible to most people using it.

Tom Lane

[jadavis]

Tom Lane, one of the core developers of PostgreSQL RDBMS, is an amazing developer.

He cranks out new features, fixes difficult bugs, helps the release process, and answers questions to newbies and developers alike.

He can break down a tough problem in no time and give the real answer clearly. He knows when a feature is just the latest DB buzzword and won't be a net win. He'll explain for the 1000th time why PostgreSQL is not using an index on someone's 12-record test data, or autogenerated test data where 90% of the records match.

He is a brilliant developer and has taught me a lot about practical database development.

But QMail's not open source!

[Xtifr]

Not that I object to the nomination of Russ, who's done a lot more than that, but his contributions to a support list for a decidedly NOT open source MTA is hardly a good justification for calling him an unsung hero of open source!

If we were limited to picking just one unsung hero, I'd probably vote for Roland McGrath over Russ, but since nobody said I had to vote for just one, I'll happily give Russ a vote too. :)

Re:"Everyone"

[Alan Cox]

My mum knows who Linus Torvalds is. OTOH she and a lot of open source people don't know much about Ulrich Drepper without whose tireless work we'd not have all the C library support and standards compliance we do

But there are zillions of open source people who really matter, often in non-obvious ways. People like Bill Hanneman whose code few people use and everyone else hopes never to need to use, but whose code gets us into goverment and helps its users in important ways. The answer to that riddle btw is that he writes accessibility software so the disabled can use the Linux desktops.

A free software role call would be a truely gigantic document and its precisely this that makes it work. Not just the big names but the tens of thousands of people who contributed an hour once to report and fix a bug.

People

[julesh]

Lots of people already mentioned, but also one that doesn't seem to have been...

Simon Tatham, author of PuTTY. Which probably qualifies as one of the most commonly used pieces of free software on Windows. He also wrote almost all of NASM (to which I contributed a little), and I've seen his name in the Linux kernel too (to be precise, it was in the VGA console driver code).

If you're ever in Coventry again, I'll buy you a drink. :)

Markus Friedl

[^BR]

On word: OpenSSH [openssh.com].

He did not write it alone, one must not forget the work of Tatu Ylonen but singlehandledly wrote the SSH2 support integrated in the same daemon (ssh.com one forks a different daemon based on the protocol) in a very short time, making it the best SSH implementation around.

Bram Moolenaar

[Mr2cents]

Author of vim. When you spend some time figuring out a program to the bottom you tend to know who the author is.

Some other people too, but I cannot remember their names since they are Slavic and unpronouncable.

Wietse Venema

[dhammabum]

Author of postfix and co-author of the Coroner's Toolkit (along with Dan Farmer).

An IBM research fellow. Nice guy.

Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them

[zonker]

i wholeheartedly agree. thanks for pointing them out too. there's a guy in the popfile team that wrote an awesome windows installer that not only installs but configures the application just like any normal windows app. it's a great addition to the featureset and makes the program more appealing to the general userbase.

stuff like regression testing each time a new release comes out, good ui designers, code porters... yeah, the list is long.