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.

Raymond’s 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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