Ten faces of extraordinary people

From Linux 101, The beginner's guide to all things Linux.

Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) began the development of the Linux kernel, and today acts as the project coordinator.

Inspired by the teaching system Minix, he felt the need for a capable UNIX operating system that he could run on his home PC. Torvalds did the original development of the Linux kernel primarily in his own time and on his equipment. Only about 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself, though he remains the ultimate authority on what new code and innovations are incorporated into the Linux kernel. In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

Wikipedia: Linus Torvalds

Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS; born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the Free Software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom. He invented the concept of copyleft to protect the ideals of this movement, and enshrined this concept in the widely-used GNU General Public License for software.

He is a notable programmer whose major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. Since the mid 1990s Stallman has relinquished most of his software engineering duties in order to focus on the advocacy of free software. His remaining development time is devoted to GNU Emacs. He is currently supported by various fellowships, maintaining a modest standard of living while discharging his duties as an itinerant evangelist and "philosopher" of free software. His image was taken from the cover of the O'Reilly book Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, published in March, 2002.

Wikipedia: Richard Stallman

Mark Shuttleworth (born September 18, 1973) is a South African entrepreneur best known in the Linux community for his leadership on the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of Debian, a Linux distribution. In 2004 he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian, through his company Canonical Ltd. In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and free and open source software projects in South Africa, such as The Freedom Toaster. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars.

Wikipedia: Mark Shuttleworth

Andrew Morton is a Linux kernel developer. He became the maintainer of the 2.6 kernel after Linus Torvalds released the first stable version on December 17, 2003. He is employed by OpenSource Development Laboratory, along with Torvalds, to maintain the Linux kernel's development series.

Morton is not as main-stream as the first three but he is an important person to Linux development. He majored in electrical engineering, which gave him a powerful background in developing software to work with hardware.

Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a free software programmer from Mexico, best known for starting the GNOME project. He started writing free software in 1992.

De Icaza started the GNOME project in August 1997, with Federico Mena, to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Earlier, de Icaza had worked on the Midnight Commander file manager, as well as the Linux kernel.

In 1999, de Icaza co-founded Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented free software company with Nat Friedman, and employed a large number of other GNOME hackers. In 2001, Helix Code, now renamed to Ximian, announced the Mono project, a project led by de Icaza, to implement Microsoft's new .NET development platform on Linux and Unix-like platforms. In August 2003, Ximian was acquired by Novell.

Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 FSF Award for the Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

Winifred Mitchell Baker, better known simply as Mitchell Baker, is Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Trained as a lawyer, Baker coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. In 2005, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world and she has been affectionately given the title of "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at the Mozilla Corporation.

Wikipedia: Mitchell Baker

Michael Tiemann is a true open source software pioneer. He made his first major open source contribution over a decade ago by writing the GNU C++ compiler, the first native-code C++ compiler and debugger. His early work led to the creation of leading open source technologies and the first open source business model.

In 1989, Tiemann's technical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found Cygnus Solutions, the first company to provide commercial support for open source software. During his ten years at Cygnus, Tiemann contributed in a number of roles from President to hacker, helping lead the company from fledgling start-up to an admired open source leader.

Tiemann serves on a number of boards, including the Open Source Initiative and the GNOME Foundation. Tiemann also provides financial support to organizations that further the goals of software and programmer freedom, including the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Tiemann recently has been advocating for RedHat to take a stronger role in supporting the Fedora Core community, feeling that long time RedHat supporters have been neglected in favor of RedHat Enterprise Linux.

Alan Cox is heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel. He maintained an old branch (2.2.x), and his own versions of the previous stable branch (2.4.x) (signified by an "ac" in the version, for example 2.4.3-ac1). He was commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself, although this has changed over time.

Cox is employed by Red Hat and lives in Swansea, Wales. He is an ardent supporter of programming freedom, and an outspoken opponent of software patents, the DMCA and the CBDTPA.

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet.

As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement and pursue other interests. He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the GNU Debugger. He founded the FreeS/WAN project, an implementation of IPSec, to promote the encryption of Internet traffic.

He owns the domain toad.com. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay, allowing friends who travel to send e-mail through his server. In March 2002, this was in the news since an Internet virus had that mail server hardcoded as one of the open mail relays it would use to propagate itself. In October 2002, John's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access because he refused to stop providing his service, even though John's relay was programmed to be essentially useless to spammers and other senders of mass email.

An outspoken libertarian, Gilmore has sued the FAA, Department of Justice, and others arguing the unconstitutionality of travel security policies.

Ryan C. Gordon (icculus) is a former Loki Software employee, now responsible for icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects, as well new projects by himself and others. Gordon's site hosts, for example, projects with the code from such commercial games as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake III Arena, and many other open source projects for multiple platforms. He has also done ports of commercial projects to the Mac OS X and Linux platforms such as being hired to port the Unreal Tournament games, he has also ported non-gaming projects like Google Earth.

Wikipedia: Ryan C. Gordon