Voice of the Masses: Who is your Linux or Free Software hero?
It’s a straightforward question for this episode of our podcast: who is your biggest hero in the GNU/Linux and Free Software world? We expect that a large bunch of you will suggest Richard Stallman for founding GNU, the GPL and the Free Software Foundation. But perhaps some others will suggest Linus Torvalds for his work on the kernel and pragmatical approach to open source.
Or maybe there’s someone lesser known – or even totally unknown at this stage – who deserves a lot more credit. Jot down your musings below, and why you’ve chosen that person, and we’ll read out the best responses in our next podcast (due on Thursday, $DEITY-willing!).
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I have 2 nominations:
Fabrice Bellard is a genius. As well as develping qemu and ffmpeg, he has carried out ridiculous hacks with video cards, javascript and mathematics. Just read his wikipedia page: I can’t do him justice.
Simon Tatham is responsible for keeping me sane. PuTTY allows me to use Linux on my Windows work desktop, and his puzzles collection is awesome. He also developed NASM, which allows me to relive my youthful enthusiasm for assembly and machine code. For some reason, his projects are often criticised by purists who would prefer interfaces or protocols to be implemented in different ways. Happily, he ignores them and produces software which _works_ and works well. A lesson to us all.
It’s totally Simon Phipps – eloquent, engaged and pushing hard for open licenses.
Liam at Gaming on Linux! Works so hard to bring the gaming linux news for 1000’s to read!
I nominate Ryan C Gordon, aka Icculus.
Most of his work has been porting proprietary games, but he’s done open-source stuff too such as work on SDL and designing FatELF and he supports the community with his website and with his talks (there are some good ones on youtube). Ryan has probably done more for gaming on Linux than any other individual, though all the Loki software guys deserve some credit. The sheer number of ports he has done should earn him some recognition.
Certainly Ryan C. Gordon and also Ethan Lee, aka flibitijibibo. The first one is behind SDL and MojoSetup, the other one is behind FNA and MonoGame which allows developers port games easily from XNA. I cannot stress enough how much Linux gaming owes these two guys.
Other people worth crediting are: Edward Rudd, the porting technical director at Humble, and a newer face on the Linux porting scene, Aaron Melcher (Knockout Games).
First of all, I would like to name Fabrice Bellard.
For qemu, ffmpeg, and tcc. This guy rocks.
Then I would like to name the suckless and cat-v guys, they produce amazing, readable and simple software which gives me the power to DO.
Also: Theo de Raadt. Writing OpenBSD may be a very hard job, but as with suckless, his code gives me joy.
And of course the work of _why.
Phil Zimmermann, who has created PGP and opened the source code in 1991.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann
I’d like to nominate Alan Cox.
He was instrumental in making Linux usable in the early days when he installed Linux on a Computer Society machine at the University of Swansea and set about fixing many bugs and becoming one of the main kernel maintainers.
As a strong Free Software advocate, he went on to work for Red Hat and Intel, and has been involved in many Free Software projects like Gnome and X.Org.
Above and beyond all this, he’s a model railway enthusiast, running his own company producing N gauge kits, he has one of the all-time great beards, and he’s Welsh – always a good thing.
I vote for Martin Gräßlin. He is not only a great developer, but he is always positive amidst some not-so-nice feedback. There was a recent post about a prominent developer stating that KDE Plasma 5 is not usable. Instead of ignoring it or getting enraged about it, he has been logically addressing it through a variety of blog posts. This is, of course, alongside his other great posts about improvements with kwin and Wayland. If we had more developers like Martin, we would have more great applications and less vitriol.
I will nominate Sarah Sharp for doing the right thing and calling out ad behavior. I know some people think men behaving badly is always excusable, and women should just stop talking about it. But that is wrong. there is a sexism problem in open source, and it needs to be addressed. WE cannot thrive by driving away half of our talent.
Absolutely agreed on this one. I wish more men would see it for what it is and challenge the status quo. Unfortunately we still seem to have a lot of schmucks that can’t see past their peckers and try to justify it.
The bigger danger is allowing SJW rubbish to invade open source. It isn’t good Sarah felt that she had to leave, but to what degree is this really a problem? You don’t know do you? And do you know that we really are driving away half the talent? No you don’t.
Seconding that also.
I vote Sarah Sharp too. And as usual with this issue, the responses against pointing out the existence of sexism in OSS proves it.
Whilst seconding the previous nominations for Fabrice Bellard and Theo de Raadt, I’d like to add an older name into the mix: Doug McIlroy.
Although long preceding the Free Software movement and the birth of Linux, the invention of pipes — which is attributed to McIlroy[*] — facilitated a modular architecture that resulted in the growth of tools that do one thing, and do it well; without which we simply wouldn’t have the Unix-like systems that we all use and love today.
[*] http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/
Nice mention. Definetly worthy of recognition for a great idea that became something we take for granted.
I may be unpopular because of this, but I think Mark Shuttleworth has done a great job with Canonical and Ubuntu, as it has helped Linux spread out and become more widely available and known about. I highly doubt manufacturers like Dell, HP etc would be selling PCs with Linux on them if it wasn’t for Ubuntu. Ubuntu has become the go-to distribution for anyone who is interested in trying Linux, and I think we should thank Shuttleworth for that.
Completely agree and for the same reasons.
You’re very right. If you said that several years ago in the pre-unity days, the response wouldn’t be unpopularity so much as “well duh of course Mark Shuttleworth”. We shouldn’t forget how we used to all love Ubuntu and how much it helped Linux.
To me its the windows of linux, give me command line and get the work done my way.
I’d like to nominate the Linux Voice team. Go on, give yourselves a pat on the back.
I second that! Such an awesome contribution to the FOSS community.
The roll of honour is just too big to pick out one or two individuals; especially if you go back to the roots BL (Before Linux). Like all Technology we stand on the shoulders of Giants. So let’s have a big hand for whomever first picked up two rocks and banged them together.
Linus Torvalds for the most awesome piece of software ever: git. And Bill Joy for creating the only true text editor.
William Henry Gates III
I think Fabrice Bellard is at the top of the list. The guys is just a rockstar. think about FFMPEG, QEMU and my favorite TCC he has some real cool creations to his name.
The great thing is that even with all of this creativity there is no mention of bag language.
The second person for me is Eben Upton — yes yes i know he is more in RPI and hardware. but the impact that RPI is having on Free software makes him the second big hero.
Tim Berners-Lee, because he did it for SCIENCE!
I’ve gotta say Bruce Perens for a long list of contributions; BusyBox, Debian Social Contract, Open Source Definition and The OSI. Not the newest contributions or the most flashy but in my opinion very important ones. Also a thumbs up for Rob Malda for Slashdot which gave geeks everywhere a place just for free software/open source news.
Most of the comic book heroes I liked were anti-heroes – flawed characters but with an overwhelming sense of justice and injustice, like Marvel’s Wolverine who, despite the huge body count, seemed rather likeable in the end.
So who would be the Floss anti-hero? It has to be RMS, thrashing around tearing in to all and sundry proprietary super-villains in his zeal to rid the world of things that offend him. Like all anti-heroes, it takes some effort to like him, but it is undeniable that he has has a massive impact for Good.
Is that even question ?
RMS. Torvalds is pretty ordinary hacker. There will be other person if Torvalds didn’t exist .
But I am not sure about RMS.
My mind blown away by ignorance of these comment. Torvalds ? Sarah Sharp ? Really ? Do you have any political understanding ?
RMS’s impact was huge , not only in CS word . In whole politics world. every one of us owe RMS more than anybody in today’s whats called free operating system.
I’m a Mint user so my FOSS hero has to be Clem – Without his inspired work, Linux would still be the OS of geeks and neckbeards. Clem’s work has made it easy, accessible and ideal for getting people away from the abomination that is Windows.
As for an anti-hero, it has to be Mark Shuttleworth. We all love to hate him because of his single-minded, almost arrogant posturing, yet we all stand on the shoulders of giants and I’m sure that Clem would be the first to acknowledge that without Ubuntu (which used to be great before Unity screwed it up) there would be no Mint…
Stallman is my Linux or Free Software hero.
Stallman is my hero.
Tough one – there are so many worthy people! I know I’ll catch some flak for this, but I’ll give kudos to two people: RMS and ESR. Bear with me here…
Both men have made enormous contributions to the Free Software and Open Source movements. Both have written and spoken about software in ways which raised the discussion above the strictly technical and into the philosophical.
Most of all, each man in his own way is an imperfect, complicated, flawed person. I’ve always mistrusted ‘heroes’ who were perfect paragons (I’ve always found Superman to be boring); instead give me people who can articulate their views and, if necessary, pay a price for them.
I’d like to nominate all the people who take the extra effort to add all of the nice little features that make Linux so much more comfortable. Things like scrolling on the volume icon in the task bar to change volume or middle click to paste text selected from somewhere. There are so many little nice finishing touches in Linux that make my life easier. If I had to pick one person though, it would be Donald Knuth. For Up-arrow notation, his thoughts on religion, TeX and big O notation (e.g. O(n log n))
Everyone who creates free software.
After Phil Zimmermann and the lesser spoken about members of the PGP development this torch was carried on by the more GPL based project called GPG
Werner Koch, Who has dedicated large part of his life to GPG with very little financial reward and his founding of FSFE (European counterpart to FSF). For this work im deeply grateful. Thanks also to the Enigmail team for their hard work.
Of course a special mention to Richard stallman for his lifes dedication, vision and foresight to the FSF and starting this really important fight.
And finally to the guys who took a chance in starting their own magazine when everyone in the industry was harping on about the end of the paper based newspaper and magazine, gave the finger to those doomsayers and brought us this great magazine.
Even though I’m not using Mint anymore I have to second Clement Lefebvre. After Ubuntu’s Unity debacle he and his team jumped in and gave us a better option, a Ubuntu deLuxe with ralley stripes, gold glimmer and fairy dust.
I nominate the superb Paul Ramsey, co-founder and developer of the PostGIS spatial database extension for PostgreSQL. He’s contribution and advocacy (https://vimeo.com/142334723) on to the field of open source geospatial has been considerable.