PEOPLE
Richard Stallman
| Linus Torvalds | Bruce Perens
| Michael Tienmann | Eric
Raymond
RICHARD
STALLMAN
Richard
Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched
in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for ``GNU's
Not UNIX''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of
them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and
redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.
Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on
the kernel Linux developed by Linus
Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be some 20 million
users of GNU/Linux systems today.
Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU
C Compiler (GCC), a portable optimizing compiler which was designed
to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler
now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages.
Stallman also wrote the GNU
symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU
Emacs, and various other GNU programs.
Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics.
During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by
doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975.
In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU Project.
Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award for 1991 from
the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the
first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship,
and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology
in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's
Pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri
Rubinski Award.
For more information on Richard M. Stallman, check out
his homepage.
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LINUS
TORVALDS
Linus
B. Torvalds is the father of the operating system Linux. Born in 1969
in Finland, Torvalds wrote Linux while a graduate computer science student
at the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 1991. Torvalds makes no money
from Linux, but he holds the copyright to the kernel, or the core code.
He requires anyone who changes the source code to share it with everyone.
Since March 1997, Torvalds has been working as a software
engineer in a small Silicon Valley company named Transmeta in Santa
Clara, California.
For more information on Linus Torvalds, see his homepage.
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BRUCE
PERENS
Bruce
Perens is the primary author of The
Open Source Definition, a frequent speaker on open source topics,
and is currently the senior strategist on Linux
and Open Source for Hewlett Packard, and did a significant amount of
work on the Debian
GNU Linux Distribution. He has been a UNIX'' kernel programmer since
1981, and is the author of Electric Fence, an open source debugging
tool designed to catch malloc buffer overruns and underruns types
of bugs that are very difficult to track down with standard debugging
tools.
Perens is known for being a voice of standards within the open source
community, in the sense that he has been critical of attempts by several
companies, such as IBM, Apple, and Sun, for halfhearted or poorly implemented
attempts at open source projects. In general, he is well respected and
in the past these criticisms have played a part in influencing each
company to change their policies. His role at HP, which includes challenging
the management to rethink their approaches to open source, is a reflection
of this. His hiring by HP is also a good example of the increasing interest
and understanding of the open source phenomenon by larger computer companies.
For more information on Bruce Perens, see his homepage.
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MICHAEL
TIENMANN
Michael
Tiemann, shortly after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania,
developed an interest in GNU software and was greatly impressed by its
quality. He worked on the GCC,
GDB,
and authored the GNU C++ compiler. However, besides admiring the technical
aspects of GNU software, he took an entrepreneurial view and came to
see GNU as a business plan in disguise. In 1989, he founded
Cygnus Solutions, a company dealing with embedded software development
tools based on GNU software. Cygnus Solutions was enormously successful,
and was eventually acquired by Red Hat ten years
later.
Tiemann is currently the chief technology officer of Red Hat, working
to popularize the distribution of Linux and compete against proprietary
software firms such as Microsoft and Sun. Cygnus Solutions was one of
the first companies to successfully adapted to the business model of
adding value to free software by providing customized solutions and
support.
For more information on Michael Tiemann, check out his homepage.
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ERIC
RAYMOND
Eric
Raymond is among the most outspoken evangelists of the open source movement.
Currently, he is a consultant to open source business such as VA
Linux and Red Hat a frequent speaker at open
source conferences, president and founder of the Open
Source Initiative, and the maintainer of the popular open source
program Fetchmail,
which he authored. He has also contributed to a number of other open
source programs, including GNU
emacs.
Based on his experience with Fetchmail and other open source projects,
Raymond has written a number of articles about the open source movement
from a sociological perspective. He ran Fetchmail partly as an experiment
in how to manage an open source project, releasing code early
and often, maintaining a huge list of beta testers, and placing
a very large emphasis on paying attention to his testers/contributors
and encouraging feedback.
Raymonds personal views on software reflect his very libertarian
outlook on life. He is an outspoken proponent of the GNU movement and
free software, subscribes to a very liberal interpretation of the first
and second Amendments to the Constitution, advocates gun ownership,
and is a self-proclaimed anarchist.
For more information on Eric Raymond, see his homepage
or the Open Source
Initiative homepage.
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