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.
Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of important stuff is often not visible (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:DO NOT CLICK- DISGUSTING IMAGE (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't just mention them... nominate them (Score:3, Interesting)
The $500 awards go to plenty of other people that aren't in the news all the time and deserve the awards and recognition. And secondly if people would nominate more projects and people then we'd know about other deserving winners.
John.
Bill Gates... (Score:5, Funny)
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:Bill Gates... (Score:4, Funny)
I had that planned all along. You dont think I actually use my own products do you?
Now thanks to FreeBSD and Linux I can finally kill my aging Xenix and Openserver installations. Sco took the bait.
Unsung sexy helpers! (Score:4, Funny)
Look all the way at the bottom. There's one guy there that did a TON for the community
Re:Unsung sexy helpers! (Score:4, Funny)
I wanna be thanked for kicking people too!
"Everyone" (Score:4, Insightful)
Define "everyone". Ask mom who Bill Gates is and she'll probably know. Ask mom who Linus Torvalds is and expect a blank stare.
Re:"Everyone" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Everyone" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
ROFL (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, no fair! Anyone besides Alan Cox.
Eric Andreychek (Score:5, Informative)
Gene Spafford (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gene Spafford (Score:4, Funny)
Ha! The idiot can't even spell 'intarweb'.
Re:Gene Spafford (Score:5, Interesting)
Gene Spafford, another computer security expert, likened hacker break-ins to "being pecked to death by ducks."
More at http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/tripunit/spaf-
The Samba Team (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Samba Team (Score:3, Funny)
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:
- the Netatalk team
- the CAP team
And a list of people, listed alphabetically by team. For a fun challenge, figure out the projects they worked on.- Allen Briggs
- Nigel Pearson
- Bill Studenmund
- John Wittkoski
- Colin Wood
- ------------------
- Fred Bacon
- Michael Burg
- Gilbert Coville
- Brett Halle
- Mark Hatle
- Nick Stephens
I'm sure I left out a bunch of people I should have listed, but it's a start.Re:The Samba Team (Score:5, Funny)
aw c'mon, ------------------ gets his share of credit, i see his name is source code all over the place
Definately Roland "Blood-bath" McGrath (Score:5, Informative)
Also a very cool, unassuming guy.
Re:Definately Roland "Blood-bath" McGrath (Score:3, Informative)
Red Demon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Red Demon (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Red Demon (Score:5, Interesting)
At least that's what my BSD book says. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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.
Re:Donald Becker (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Donald Becker (Score:3, Interesting)
He's friendly to newbie strangers, too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He's friendly to newbie strangers, too (Score:3, Interesting)
i don't remember what i asked him, but his answer was quick and to the point. it was certainly a 'wow' moment, and it encouraged me to read and try to understand most of the kernel (that wasn't so difficult those days of Linux 0.99pl9). I even wrote a device driver, an early version of nbd, but when i tried to submit it, linux 1.1 was underway... and before i could read it again, 2.0 was just on the horizon...
anyway, his attitude was what totally made me an open source belei
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.
Some people may not like this selection... (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the crap I'm sure he's had to put up with, I gotta give him props for his effort. Thanks, Branden!
Heres to you! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Russ Nelson (Score:5, Funny)
-russ
Re:Russ Nelson (Score:3, Insightful)
> before nominating myself.
I second this nomination - Russ helps lots of people out on the QMail mailing lists. Props!
But QMail's not open source! (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Russ Nelson (Score:3, Interesting)
-russ
Sometimes it's the evangelists. (Score:5, Interesting)
That incident has always symbolised the entire Open Source movement to me -- distributed thinking and determination coming up with a powerful solution, despite all the naysayers' opinions.
I don't know that he's so much a hero, but (Score:3, Informative)
Donald Becker (Score:5, Insightful)
cat $(find
or even
dmesg |grep Donald Becker
Just in
Re:Donald Becker (Score:5, Funny)
too much freedom? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:too much freedom? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 oppos
Bram Moolenaar... (Score:5, Funny)
I have no idea what kind of software that 'Stallman' fellow has written, although I wish him luck -- maybe his project will catch on.
Re:Bram Moolenaar... (Score:3, Insightful)
WGET!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Designed and implemented Wget.
Personally, I feel wget is the greatest software every to hit the GNU/Linux desktop!
Re:WGET!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ba
In the KDE world... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure what really defines a hero; in fact most of our "heros" in the F/OSS community probably aren't those who have contributed the most. More often they're just the guys that are stark-raving-mad and don't want anyone to miss the circus.
Re:John Levon, the LyX Qt don, gets my nod (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sourceforge (Score:5, Interesting)
It gave coders the resources they needed to get multi-coder open-source projects to the public.
It gave the public the resources they needed to find the solutions they need and interact with the coders.
I wish they'd had this sooner. (Score:5, Interesting)
When he lost his sight to diabetes, I acted as his caregiver and "seeing eye person." I helped him write software tools and subroutines for general use in Project Voyager. I watched him move bytes around absolute memory addresses in FORTRAN 77, although the language was supposed to prevent this. He was, as Jerry Pournelle once wrote, "the sane genius." He died in 1988, but he's still one of the greats in my book and in that of everybody who knew him.
Re:I wish they'd had this sooner. (Score:4, Informative)
A google reveals this snippet too The Alderson Drive [wikiverse.org]
Re:I wish they'd had this sooner. (Score:3, Interesting)
Jim WIlkinson (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
I vote for Bill Joy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I vote for Bill Joy (Score:3, Interesting)
Here [pdx.edu] are [theregister.co.uk] a couple of links to Bill Joy interview content which explains some things about the origins of vi. Basically it came from the fact that ed was bloody unusable and if you had a glass terminal with cursor control, which was most of them (though some needed a ROM revision - that's not mentioned, though ROMs for uppercase are) then clearly it made more sense to have a screen editor, not a line editor.
It's amazing to think that vi is actually easier to use than something else, though I used edlin b
john carmack (Score:4, Insightful)
Question: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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.
Not really answering your question , but .. (Score:3, Interesting)
The authors (or the maintainors) never left their names in the body of literature or text. We can only guess at the people who created those ancient texts from other sources. The reasoning for doing that [i guess] was that, the work if it can, will survive because of its own ability and the fame for that work is same as fame for its author.
It is perhaps the same thing that prompts us to contribute to the OSS - so that we can feel that at least a part of our selves survive through them.
Everyone who ever contributed to Jakarta projects (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sam Lantingna libsdl (Score:4, Insightful)
Stonewolf
www.stonewolf.net
Darl McBride (Score:4, Funny)
Aww (Score:4, Funny)
Does somebody need a hug???? Come'er! We'll give you one, but it'll be sloppy, overwhelming, we'll argue the whole time we're giving it, and then we'll vanish.
Paul Vixie (Score:3, Informative)
whoever first put porn on the internet (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god for porn!
Max
John W. Eaton (Score:4, Informative)
Theo DeRaadt.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Theo DeRaadt.... (Score:3, Informative)
Henry Spencer (Score:5, Insightful)
Tim Berners-Lee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tim Berners-Lee (Score:3, Interesting)
When I ask my students if they know who he is, 99% of the time it draws a blank stare. This happens with other techies of an older age as well. It's really a shame. He is the father of a great change in computing and a new business paradigm when you think about it.
Then agai
Gerard Beekmans (Score:4, Informative)
Embedded Guru (Score:5, Informative)
The whole GNU team (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
off the top of my head... (Score:5, Insightful)
Brian Fox, author of the Bash shell (Score:4, Interesting)
Brian Fox was the original author.
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.
The esoteric OSS projects (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
--
Tom Lane (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
People (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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:Darl McBride / Second this (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks, Darl...you make Linux what it is
Re:Closed source devs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heros? Check ego at door! (Score:3, Informative)
OSS developers survey [berlios.de]
Re:A True Open Source Hero is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A True Open Source Hero is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A True Open Source Hero is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Gates encouraged MANY MANY people to flock to open source from almost day one. His "Basic" for the altair, even before he released his very first commercial program, his attitude towards users and others was so awful that many people hated him from day one. He sent a foaming at the mouth rant as an open Letter to all [tranquileye.com]
I remember sending him a letter at the ripe old age of 10 asking about when BASIC was going to be released so I could play with it on my dad's computer at work.
I was Flamed hard in a rude reply about how software Thieves were delaying it and as a child it was beyond my capabilities anyways... I wish I still had the letter and I remember how it solidified in me a dis-taste for commercial software. I was writing assembly for my Commodore KIM-1 single board computer at that time and was excited with the idea of being able to easily program a real powerhouse computer.
Bill gates has been driving people to Open source ever cince he started in the business.
Re:A True Open Source Hero is... (Score:5, Funny)
A: Well sure, it's like silvery or goldy but it's made out of iron.
*** rimshot ***
Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Tip your waitresses and bartenders - they're working hard for you!!
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:Steve Jobs (Score:3, Funny)
LK