It is not the first time I write about forgotten names in Open Source world. However, I pretend to rewrite the list of forgotten names as time goes by, in order to include more names that I could have previously forgotten, or even that appear in the scene due to the increasing popularity in the actual Open Source scene.
For this reason, this post is not about Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza, ... These are recognized names in Open Source Software environment.
In the "Open Source Hall of Fame", the most known names would be, from my perspective:
- Linus Torvalds: Linux/Git
- Richard Stallman: GNU
Period. These two names are the most known names in the scene., and continue to be, up to date. With a little bit less importance, but still very known, there is a bunch of name including:
- Miguel de Icaza: Gnome/Mono
- Mattias Ettrich: Kde
- Bruce Perens: OSI/Debian
- Eric S. Raymond: OSI/fetchmail
- Donald E. Knuth: Latex
- Theo de Raadt: OpenBSD/OpenSSH
- Mark Shuttleworth: Ubuntu
Meanwhile, on the other hand, there is a much bigger bunch of names that are not as recognized as they should. The aim of this entry is to bring to foreground some of these names, in order to recognize their contribution to the Open Source Community, and also allow readers of this blog to make their opinions of other names that should be included.
Below are, IMHO, the usually names that are not recognized as they should in the Open Source scene:
Robert McCool:
Original author of the NCSA HTTP server, which later turned into the Apache Web Server.
Jamie Zawinski:
American Computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser. He also maintained the XScreenSaver project
Ian Murdock:
Founder of the Debian distribution, wrote the Debian Manifesto in 1993 while a student at Purdue University.
Brian J. Fox:
Active developer of the FSF. Author of GNU Bash, GNU Makeinfo, GNU Info, GNU Finger, and readline libraries.
Alan Cox:
One of the first Linux kernel testers, Cox discovered and fixed many of existing bugs and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem.
He then became one of the main developers and maintainers of the whole kernel.
He has also been involved in the GNOME and X.Org projects.
He left Linux kernel development in January 2013, supposedly due to familiar issues.
Greg Kroah-Hartman:
Linux kernel developer, maintainer of the stable branch, as well as various subsystems such as USB, driver core, debugfs, userspace I/O and TTY layer. It is surely the number 2 in Linux kernel project after Alan Cox has quit from the project.
Larry Wall:
Creator of Perl Programming Language, also known for beeing the developer of the "patch" tool or "rn", the Usenet client.
Guido Van Rossum:
Dutch computer programmer, author of the Python programming language.
Yukihiro Matsumoto:
Japanese computer scientist and software programmer, best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language.
Brendan Eich:
Computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript scripting language. He is the chief technology officer at the Mozilla Corporation.
Rasmus Lerdorf:
Danish programmer, creator of the PHP language.
John Chambers - Ross Ihakaand/Robert Gentleman:
Creators of S (Chambers) and R (Ihakaand/Gentleman) statistical computing programming languages.
Mart Otto/Jacob Thornton:
Creators of the Twitter Bootsrap framework, one of the most web frameworks used nowadays for creation of Responsive Web pages and Web applications.
James Strachan/Graeme Rocher:
For Groovy and Grails respectively.
Mark Spencer:
Computer engineer, original author of the GTK instant messaging client Gaim (renamed to Pidgin).
He is also the creator of Asterisk, a Linux-based open-sourced PBX in software, as well as l2tpd and the Cheops Network User Interface.
Michael Tiemann:
Contributor to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU Debugger.
Daniel Robbins:
Founder and former chief architect of the Gentoo Linux project.
Rob Young:
Robert "Bob" Young is a serial entrepreneur whose biggest success has been Red Hat Inc, the open source software company.
Gaël Duval:
Graduate of the Caen University in France. In July 1998, he created Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), a Linux distribution originally based on Red Hat Linux and KDE.
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis:
They both started development of Gimp in 1995 on Berkeley University, California.
Bill Joy / Chuck Haley:
The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976, as the visual mode for a line editor called ex that Joy had written with Chuck Haley.
Theodore Y. "Ted" Ts'o:
Is a software developer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems (e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, and maintainer for the ext4 file system).
Harald Welte:
German programmer, well known as a hacker of the Linux kernel, enforcer of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Also involved in a number of free software projects, such as Openmoko, (a version of Linux for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones) and the netfilter/iptables project.
Jörg Schilling:
Computer programmer who has worked extensively on compact disc burning software "cdrtools", the Solaris Operating System and the OpenSolaris project. He has also been involved on BerliOS Linux distribution.
Rob Savoye:
Primary developer of Gnash, he is developer of the GNU Project. He has also worked on Red Hat, Debian, and other libre software projects.
Some of the projects he has worked on include GCC, GDB,[3] DejaGnu, Cygwin, eCos and CTAS.
Árpád Gereöffy:
He started development of MPlayer in 2000.
Fabrice Beillard:
Computer programmer who is best known as the creator of the FFmpeg and QEMU software projects.
Dries Buytaert:
Open-source software programmer notable as founder and lead developer of the Drupal CMS.
Ton Roosendaal:
Dutch software developer, known as the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender.
Andrew Tridgell:
Australian computer programmer Author of the Samba file server and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm.
Brian E. Paul:
Computer programmer who originally wrote and continues to maintain the source code for the open source Mesa graphics library.
John Gilmore:
Worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the GNU Debugger in the early 90s, initiating GNU Radio in 1998, starting Gnash in December 2005 to create a free software player for Flash movies, and writing the pdtar program which became GNU tar.
Wietse Zweitze Venema:
Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system.
Marco Pesenti:
Main developer of Galeon, Gnome's Browser.
Guenter Bartsch:
Creator of Xine Media Player.
Mark Kretschmann:
Creator of the Amarok audio player.
Roger Dannemberg / Dominic Mazzoni:
Creators of the Audacity free digital audio editor.
Olivier Fourdan:
Creator and main developer of the XFCE desktop.
As conclusion, Free Software / Open Source / Libre Software as general concept, is a wide concept contributed by dozens and dozens of thousands of not only software developers, but also software distribution packagers, activists, translators, documentary people and other roles, that have cooperated to establish one of the most important advances on the last fifty years.
Which names are, from your perspective, missing from the list ?
Do you think there should be attributions to other people ?
Which are, in your opinion, the "forgotten names" ?
