I've heard of Linus, Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth

[Sealbhach]

Who else are the big names in Linux history, past and present?


.

[ghindo]

Miguel de Icaza?

[LaRoza]

Eric S. Raymond, more known for being an advocate and writer (which is essential, as most of the other developers are quiet)

[macogw]

Sabdfl does not rank with Linus and RMS. ESR is fairly high up there though. Sabdfl's a businessman. The others are proper hackers.

[Foster Grant]

Eric S. Raymond, more known for being an advocate and writer (which is essential, as most of the other developers are quiet)

ESR, Linus and RMS are the big three, although Linus would never give himself that much credit. :D

ESR is also known for being a gun nut. Just ask him. :)

@Sealbhach: You should track down the 2001 documentary Revolution OS ... at ... um .... er .... wherever those might be found online. (I wouldn't know myself, of course. :) )

[Foster Grant]

Sabdfl does not rank with Linus and RMS. ESR is fairly high up there though. Sabdfl's a businessman. The others are proper hackers.

Shuttleworth may be a businessman, but much like Jobs and some of the other original Homebrew guys back in the 1970s, Shuttleworth is a businessman whose computer business (Thawte) started in his parents' garage, with him doing the coding himself. And Shuttleworth was a Debian developer, so it's not like he's Michael Robertson.

[kevin11951]

ESR, Linus and RMS are the big three, although Linus would never give himself that much credit. :D

ESR is also known for being a gun nut. Just ask him. :)

@Sealbhach: You should track down the 2001 documentary Revolution OS ... at ... um .... er .... wherever those might be found online. (I wouldn't know myself, of course. :) )

I have a copy of RevolutionOS, its 378.6 MB. ill send it to you if i can...

[Atomic Dog]

Douglas McIlroy, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie should be mentioned. They were the ATT employees that developed UNIX way back before most of us were born.

Linux may be different, but you can't mistake the similarities so you must give them some credit.

[Sealbhach]

I have a copy of RevolutionOS, its 378.6 MB. ill send it to you if i can...

Thanks, that's very kind of you but I'll do a little searching for it.

How about that Tannenbaum guy, I saw him mentioned on a Youtube history of Linux. He developed Minix, I think.



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[p_quarles]

How about that Tannenbaum guy, I saw him mentioned on a Youtube history of Linux. He developed Minix, I think.
Google Groups has some archives of a famous usenet flamewar between he and Linus. Worth reading.

He's not a contributor to GNU/Linux, but he certainly figures prominently in the history. More as an antagonist than anything else, though.

[Lostincyberspace]

Matthias Ettrich one of the original developers for KDE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Ettrich

[cariboo]

How come no one has mentioned Alan Cox. I haven't heard or seen anything of him in the last year or two.

Jim

[YaroMan86]

I was about to say Alan Cox.

Naturally there's LBT, RMS, and ESR.

[samjh]

Sabdfl does not rank with Linus and RMS. ESR is fairly high up there though. Sabdfl's a businessman. The others are proper hackers.If it weren't for businessmen, Linux would still belong only to basement computers and university laboratories.

There are a lot of people in FOSS who don't get much credit because they tend to remain in the background, rather than blowing their own trumpet.

I think Marc Ewing and Bob Young should be mentioned. Ewing and Young founded Red Hat, the actual distro having been originally developed by Ewing. Young helped the business-end by being its CEO, and he co-founded Linux Journal. Red Hat, as most should know, kick-started the adoption of Linux for businesses and eventually pushed it into the mainstream.

Ian Murdock: for creating the most widely-used (for servers) and widely-based Linux distribution in the world, Debian.

Eben Moglen: the legal brains of the FSF and SFLC (he founded SFLC). He's a programmer also. Some of his quotes are classic: "We also live in a world in which the right to tinker is under some very substantial threat. This is said to be because movie and record companies must eat. I will concede that they must eat. Though, like me, they should eat less."

And where there is ESR, one should not forget Bruce Perens. Controversial perhaps, but one who fights very hard for FOSS in the political arena. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative with ESR, and basically defined "open source". He was Debian project leader for a while, and wrote the Debian Social Contract.

[LaRoza]

How could we forget Hans Reiser? Not only does he have a file system, but he has headlines in mainstream press.

Not all geeks are loners in front of the computers...

[amlucent23]

I have a copy of RevolutionOS, its 378.6 MB. ill send it to you if i can...

Revolution OS is on google video. It has been posted on there forever so I am sure it is there with permission.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&q=revolution+os+video&ei=rxxvSPSYHpm05AKtl4ibDw (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&q=revolution+os+video&ei=rxxvSPSYHpm05AKtl4ibDw)

also I think The Code: Linux was excellent but its not all in english :(

[beyboo]

Thanks, that's very kind of you but I'll do a little searching for it.
.

send me ur email by PM, will email u the torrent ;)

[Ebuntor]

At the bottom of Linux or GNU related Wikipedia pages there are lists of people who are involved.
Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#External_links


Google Groups has some archives of a famous usenet flamewar between he and Linus. Worth reading.

He's not a contributor to GNU/Linux, but he certainly figures prominently in the history. More as an antagonist than anything else, though.

Actually Andy Tanenbaum does help the GNU project a bit. He's a professor at my university and I understand he regularly contributes to the GNU C Compiler and several other GNU projects. He however still avoids Linux at all costs :)

[Sealbhach]

Sabdfl does not rank with Linus and RMS. ESR is fairly high up there though. Sabdfl's a businessman. The others are proper hackers.

I didn't ask whether they were hackers or not. Mark Shuttleworth is a big name in the Linux story - he's the reason I'm using Linux now. For years I was waiting for Linux to become useable by ordinary minds like my own.

Thanks to the Ubuntu distro, that is now possible.




There are a lot of people in FOSS who don't get much credit because they tend to remain in the background, rather than blowing their own trumpet.

That's exactly why I asked, I want to know who I should be grateful to.


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[articpenguin]

Theodore Tso. Maintainer of ext2/3/4. He is also the first programmer from north america on linux according to linus.

[zmjjmz]

Ian Murdock.
He was the main developer/founder of Debian.

[ProteinPappa]

How could we forget Hans Reiser? Not only does he have a file system, but he has headlines in mainstream press.

Not all geeks are loners in front of the computers...
True... Some are also murderers, apparently.

[jimi_hendrix]

bill gates...

[Skripka]

True... Some are also murderers, apparently.

It gives Linux more "character", I think.... ;)

[earthpigg]

Mark Shuttleworth is a big name in the Linux story - he's the reason I'm using Linux now. For years I was waiting for Linux to become useable by ordinary minds like my own.

THAT.

(if my text is bigger, it is more valid.)

[kk0sse54]

Patrick Volkerding ,head of Slackware, been there since founding it way back in the early nineties.

[Grant A.]

Ian Murdock

[WaeV]

Oh yeah, good thing he was around. :)

[Sorivenul]

Patrick Volkerding ,head of Slackware, been there since founding it way back in the early nineties.
I was surprised he hadn't come up sooner.

[mihai.ile]

Nobody heard of John 'Maddog' Hall? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) )

He was one time here in Portugal and the way he speaks of open source software is simply amazing!
I think you can find some videos on youtube, including this one about Mark Shuttleworth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYztkEcvsCc

[speedwell68]

bill gates...

I was thinking that, if MS had come with a decent OS in first place, well the rest is history.

[Sorivenul]

I was thinking that, if MS had come with a decent OS in first place, well the rest is history.

Technically, they did, with Xenix, it was the introduction of the Windows system amongst a few other things that became their problems.