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The 2000 Beanies

Category: Unsung Hero 87

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fun-for-the-whole-family dept.
As we all know, there are certain people who have achieved a lot of fame in the Open Source world. This award isn't for them. This award is designed to put ten grand into the pocket of someone who has contributed to the open source movement in a significant way but has never gotten the spotlight that they deserve. Talk about it. And Nominate the person who deserves it most.
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Category:Unsung Hero More

Category:Unsung Hero

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  • I'm unsung and kind off an hero... Does that make me qualified?
  • I realize I'm going to get a lot of argument about this nomination, but I'm not going to discuss, I'm just going to do it: I nominate Richard M Stallman.
    ---
  • I'd like to nominate Cynthia F. Kurtz for her work on the GPL'd Garden Simulator at: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com [gardenwithinsight.com]

    Cynthia put four person-years of work into this product (unpaid), which is released under the GPL. A year of that time was spent in a dark apartment in Des Moines, Iowa translating convoluted USDA soil science modeling equations from spaghetti Fortran to C++ and then Delphi. She then wrote an incredible help system and documentation, which serves as a major GPL'd reference work on soil science and agricultural modelling. Her persistance in finishing the project in the face of discouragement and isolation was awesome.

    Because this software is in Delphi and is an end-user application, it hasn't really attracted much attention by the Open Source community. It has however been downloaded by thousands of people around the globe to learn more about how to grow food sustainably. Hopefully, if Borland/Inprise releases Delphi for Linux as planned, this software might become an important Linux application.

    (Disclaimer: This award nomination is a bit self-serving since I put two person-years in on that project too, and Cynthia is my wife.)

  • For xanim, even though it counts as non-free. Source for DLLs for some video types is closed-source because he signed a contract to obtain them. He's been working on that project since around 1993.
  • Bowie Poag..hands down
  • Who ever gets this award does not deserve it. If they are a unsung hero and then the get sung (by getting the award) then they are a sung hero. Why on earth would you give the award for the best unsung hero to a sung hero?
  • definitely a hero, definitely unsung. he's been working on xfree86 [xfree86.org] for eight years [usyd.edu.au]. we all use X. although you'd really want to give the gong to all four founders of the project.
  • Alfredo and WindowMaker get zero hype, but it's IMHO the stablest, best looking and most usable desktop out there.

  • Ralf S. Engelschall (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    for: Apache, GNU pThreads, WML, gFont, ePerl, ect.
  • For his tremendous efforts in bringing Open Source stuff to the Mac. He has authored MacPerl and GUSI (a POSIX library for Mac OS), and has ported many other Unix Open Source programs. Hip hip, hooray!
  • Father of DBI/DBD perl modules, has been delivering DBI and DBD::Oracle modules, for at least five years now. Without DBI Perl would never have been as instrumental in creating the Web as it is today.

  • Theo de Raadt.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Without him, there'd be no OpenBSD, without OBSD, I would have no life.

    Think about this, he's dedicated his whole life to his OS. Spending his own time and money to give people a real Operating System, that's secure by default.

  • I've nominated Mike Heins at an Unsung Hero. His package, Minivend (www.minivend.com), is a powerful and free e-commerce package. Minivend rivals the most expensive e-commerce packages but it totally open-source (GPL). This package is in production use by many businesses. Real companies who's income is dependant directly on open source software. This software is largely behind the scenes so it is a good pick for "unsung".
  • Eric Norum has been a long time submitter to the RTEMS project. He is the principal person behind such important submissions as the TCP/IP stack, MC68360 Board Support Package, and TFTP client filesystem. He is currently porting the EPICS package to RTEMS and is porting other open source packages such as GNU libavl and readline as part of this project.
  • Who started the first SunSITE (as a vast FTP archive, comparable to wustl)? Paul Jones.

    This was the original home of the LDP, and hosts hundreds of Web and FTP collections. It's a super-mirror of Linux distributions and much more. At 175G of FTP (including nearly 60G of Linux) and another 35G HTML, this is still a public collection of awesome proportion.

    metalab.unc.edu [unc.edu] (formerly SunSITE).

    Disclaimer: Paul's office is about 10 yards from mine.

  • Re:RMS (Score:1)

    by Smack ( 977 )
    Ahem. Perhaps you are referring to some other Richard M Stallman than the one who is sung about quite often here.
  • Any large group, such as open-source-anauts, must have a shared culture of some sort. The Simpsons is it in this case. Without Groening, where would be?
  • I nominate a split award for two leaders in the Real Time Linux Arena. The Real Time extensions to Linux are no easy patch. These guys have worked long and hard to create capabilities not available in any other OS on the planet. Their work is taking Linux on a roller coaster ride into and through industry. Watch this space in 2000.
  • Lucky for us, someone is giving us a good open source encryption toolbox, instead of charging for it like everyone else. OpenSSL is the basis of much (most?) encryption in open-source software. Where would we be without it?
  • Caretaker of the Trinity OS document [csuchico.edu], David Ranch has put together a solid series of well-maintained recommendations for not only securing Linux, but configuring it from the ground-up. Best of all, I like the fact that he seems to follow the Perl motto. No one distro is necessarily any better, at least once the Trinity OS helps you lock down or tweak what wasn't before.

    Thanks for the hard work.

  • I nominate Dave Shields and Philippe Charles for the advocate's award.

    These dudes convinced IBM to allow a patentable piece of company invention to be placed into the Open Source movement.

    Given that IBM is fanatic about protecting the company's assets, the sales job that these two must have done cannot be over-applauded.

    To put it another way, these two changed one of the basic operating principles of an $81Billion company.

    There can be no higher or steeper mountain.
  • I truely believe JKH's contribution to the FreeBSD project deserves recognition. I have been constantly impressed with the quality and completeness of the fbsd distributions over the past few years. I trust no other OS to perform as reliably and to be as easily maintained.
  • I nominate David Hinds for the sometimes thankless job of maintaining the pcmcia-cs driver package for the last several years.

    For over 5 years (The first version in the CHANGES file with a date is 2.8.1, which was released 18-Dec-1995), pcmcia-cs has been one of the mainstays of Linux device drivers, providing lowlevel drivers for pcmcia and cardbus devices, and the card management tools, which I feel work as well or better than any other PCMCIA management system out there for any platform.

    Anyone who has a laptop owes a great debt to David, who has never received much recognition for his work. Remember that Linux based laptops were one of the eary entries for Linux into the workplace (but I NEED a Unix system when I travel and a portable Sun is $30,000!), and this would not have been possible without David.

    jf
  • I second that. He could use the funds, too. According to an interview I read, he's developing Window Maker on a 100mhz Pentium. Can't VA hook him up with some hardware? He deserves it.
  • I agree (I have pointed a number of other reasons why David is a great guy in this nomination [slashdot.org] for another category).

    David & Co. have created a great piece of software and he has been very supportive. Whenever I had technical trouble, he'd give solid, helpful answers within short time.

    Go David! :-)

    ------------------
  • Kevin Lenzo is:
    • the active maintainer of the CMU EFnet IRC server,
    • the author and maintainer of the INSANELY cool infobot project (http://www.infobot.org/ [infobot.org]),
    • and most importantly, the unpaid organizer of the non-profit Yet Another Perl Conference (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/yapc/ [cmu.edu]), a grass-roots open-source conference that turned out far better than O'Reilly's $1,000-per-person corporate-oriented Perl conference.
    Sure, this isn't the kind of visibly heroic evangelistic effort that you see from people like RMS and ESR and Bruce Perens... but then, if you're looking for unsung heroes, I couldn't think of a guy who deserves it more.
  • I've got two nominations

    First, Jordan K. Hubbard. jkh has been the somewhat-unofficial leader of the FreeBSD group for years now, and has somehow kept his cool no matter how much people are going bezerk around him. Search the freebsd-* mailing list archives, and get a good example of his character.

    Second, Marshall Kirk McKusick. He's always been present to remind the *BSD groups of past mistakes, and giving guidance. He's also contributed Softupdates, which is kinda a paranoid version of mounting your filesystems async. Anything that speeds up disk access as much as softupdates does without adding any data risk is quite worthy of recognition.
  • for convincing netscape-management to open up the source of navigator.

    heckers paper which convinced the management is in here [hecker.org]. the whole story is here [oreilly.com].

    the event was important in the history of open source, as it was the first major company opening it's source and many followed by now ( opencascade.org, zope.org )

  • Not to repeat [slashdot.org] myself but I'm still voting for Mark Pauline.

    You want open source? You can look at his creations in VRML, watch them being built, and see them tested. You can learn from his mistakes and see how his creations evolved.

    Open source doesn't have to mean software.

  • Look on the bright side of things, at least he'll try to make Window Maker run fast, seeing as he's got a slow computer himself :)

    -m

    99 little bugs in the code,
    99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...

  • Paul Vixie: the author of BIND and the founder of the Internet Software Consortium.

    Not only Bind, he's also done a much improved version of cron wich made it into many UNIX distributions (the so called "Vixie-cron", type mancron|grep-ivixie to see if it's installed on your system).

    But I want to extend this to the whole crew of the ISC [isc.org]:

    They're not only producing and maintaining

    • BIND,
    • INN and
    • DHCP for UNIX,
    they also provide webspace, rackspace and/or bandwidth for
    • NetBSD,
    • Sendmail and
    • Xfree86.

    Oh, and they run one of the root name servers.

    And they do a lot of other things for us (Some mirrors, archives, surveys...)

    Thank you, ISC!

  • Behind every good man is a good woman!
  • Sven is the troglo-master! By fearlessly advocating for console based applications, he has made possible the continued success of all my most beloved apps: mutt, slrn, and vim! Sven has been on lusenet 24/7 for at least 5 years. It's a fact!
  • Not sure if this award can be given posthumously, but I can't think of a person better suited to receive it. Perhaps the award could be donated to projects that Postel was involved in...
  • I'm not that sure on this one (more stable than fvwm? - I don't think so), but IMHO WindowMaker is the most *balanced* (between stability, features and look) windowmanager for X11. And that's why I use it.

  • Jamie Zawinski is one of my all time heros.

    He speaks his mind with conviction and brutal honesty.

    He helped build Netscape back when it meant something, he's an open source advocate, releasing all this hacks, and he's one of my favorite story posters at /.

    jwz deserves recognition for just being himself. We could all learn a lot from Jamie.

  • Jon Postel, who passed away last year, pioneered the internet in the most unselfish way imaginable.

    Slashdot would do a wonderful honor to donate the money in Jon's name for recognition of his tireless efforts to help build the internet to what it is today.

    Jon Postel will always be one of my heros.
  • ...for his excellent unix programming books.
  • He wrote X-CD-Roast, the best interface to the cd writing tools. Almost everyone in the linux world who creates CDs uses X-CD-Roast. And even now, X-CD-Roast is rewritten to be the best CD writing tool there is.
  • Here, here. I second this nomination. What a product!
  • Donald Becker [nasa.gov] works tirelessly toward improvement of many drivers, PCMCIA and Beowulfs without flail or flinch.

    They ranged from Cluster Driver [nasa.gov], Gigabits Ethernet [nasa.gov], Fast Ethernet [nasa.gov], 10Mb Ethernet [nasa.gov], Token Ring, CardBus, PCMCIA, PCI, ISA network cards.

    This one dream maintainer of multiple Linux software drivers that I haven't seen any equals in a long time.

    I marvel and help tested the Intel EtherExpress 100+ Pro. This card is surely to be in the next shootout for maximum small (64b) and large (1500b) packet throughput utilization.

    Gotta start testing SMP/EEPRO100+!

  • Donald Becker!


    Check this link [slashdot.org] as to why this guy should get all the kudos:

  • The ultimate fusion of hacker and Berkeley radical. His projects have included Community Memory, the Sol, the Osbourne, the Tom Swift Terminal, the Pennywhistle modem, forerunner of all PC modems. Lee Felsenstein is truly a hero of hardware hacking.

    Two others that come to mind are Richard Greenblatt and Guy Steele (both from Lisp country), for more reasons than I can mention.

    Of course, other important people are Alonzo Church (inventor of lambda calculus, which pretty much led to everything we call computer science), Uncle John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, which pretty much led to a lot of what we call programming), Marvin Minsky (one of the great AI pioneers), and many more.

  • W. Richard Stevens (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was a dark moment not only for Linux and Unix programmers, but esp. on Slashdot when W. Richard Stevens died last year.

    His writing style was excelent, his books have helped millions of people to get the essence of Unix and network programming. Without him and his books millions of Linux and Unix programmers would not know how to program this OS' in style, provide true reliable networking software and achive astonishing things.

    For this achivement he has been badley beaten on Slashdot. He is not only an unsung hero, he is even one the community had spit on.
  • I can think of no single person more deserving of this award than Jordan K. Hubbard [freebsd.org] of Walnut Creek [cdrom.com]/The FreeBSD Project [freebsd.org]. He is the ongoing force behind FreeBSD advocacy and deserves any recognition he gets.

    Jordan is always more than willing to mail out free promotional materials whenever you need them, for whatever circumstances you may have. His willingness to help anyone out with FreeBSD is at the very least commendable, and his loyalty to the Project sets him apart from others.

    Jordan is my vote for Unsung Hero.


    --
  • I concur. Rarely do you read about everything this man does. Everything from writing kernel code to helping lowly newbies on the mailing lists. Not to mention organizing releases, etc. He gets my vote.
  • JED wrote some of the software that you and Sven (and myself) love:
    • Slrn - possibly the best news reader
    • JED - good text editor including support for folding
    • slang - alternative to curses and scripting language used in mutt
    http://space.mit.edu/~davis/slrn.html Sven would come a close second. [mit.edu]
  • The guy who made LEGO Mindstorms a reality.
    --
  • Yes, if an "unsung hero" gets the award, he/she loses his/her status as "unsung." However, up until the moment of winning, the unsung hero is still unsung, and thus still eligible.
    Maybe if just getting nominated were a great big deal, as in the Oscars where only 5 items are nominated for each category, then there would be a problem, because no nominee would be unsung any more. But here the nominations are unlimited.

    IMO, the benefits of giving an award to an unsung hero outweigh any purist semantic costs.

  • You may recall that Mr. Schoen, active member (if not founder) of the LUG at UC Berkeley, is now practically the legal vetter for ESR, if I recall correctly. I remember that during the Apple Public License controversy, it was Seth who pointed out possible problems.

    Seth is a man who stands up for his principles and lives by them. He refused to take a loyalty oath to the Constitutions of California and the US because of his capitalist-anarchist views. Because of that, he was not allowed to take his job at the University. (He works for LinuxCare now; I saw him at LWE this past summer at the Loki booth.) As well, he helped organize Windoze Refund Day. My personal love of Seth derives from his smalll comment that introduced me to this world: "Do you read Slashdot?"

    So, he's a community builder and a principled open-source advocate. Seth Schoen.

  • Doug MacEachern (Score:3)

    by Spud Zeppelin ( 13403 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2000 @07:56AM (#1411643)
    Without his work on mod_perl, many of the open-source-based solutions on the web wouldn't be possible -- among them, the site you're reading now....



    This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
  • Not true, not true. Think of the many monastic or homosexual hackers you know.

    If you read closely, you'll notice he said "behind every good man...".

  • I know that, and I appreciate JED's contributions immensely... I didn't intend to slight him, Bram Moolenaar (vim), or Mike Elkins (mutt). I feel that Sven has made the greatest overall contribution in the area of console apps by his tireless (sometimes it seemed he was on lusenet 120 hours straight!) and entirely unremunerated activity.

  • YES! (Score:1)

    by [-ET-] ( 9993 )
    I was about to post a good article on why I thought Donald Becker is THE MAN! Then I saw your post and I just have to say YES! :)

    Donald is just plain cool. I am constantly amazed at how many modules Donald has done -- with no one congratulating him or saying much anything.

    Hmm.. this reminds me, I need to e-mail Donald to see if he'd like any post-Christmas presents.

  • The C library is at least as critical to the success of Linux as the kernel, but few people know the name of the person who's mainly responsible for its success, Ulrich Drepper.

  • Re:RMS (Score:1)

    by natek ( 90783 )
    I would agree with you here, but RMS is not unsung enough. GNU has its own Slashdot category, and while ESR certainly toots his own horn a lot more than RMS--however I'd rather find someone who has done a few projects or something that are very significant but that person is not well known outside his own circle, or better, has no circle at all. RMS has gotton quite a few awards and an honorary doctorate. This award is not for him.
  • Tim Berners-Lee (& CERN): developed/invented the Web, and then gave it away: that invention is now worth billions. The whole Web/HTTP/HTML thing is one of the most important Open Source developments - even though it is almost never refered to as such. Also, the Web is probably the most important contribution to the popularisation of the Internet. If the web had been invented by any other commercial organisation, it would have been subject to restrictive licensing arrangements, which would have slowed its growth. The W3C organisation tries to ensure that the Web continues to be open to all irrespective of platform or software. It would be nice to recognise Tim's contribution by granting the prize to Tim and the W3C.
  • For leading the world's most pervasive and successful open source project ever. Sidestepping political issues, he's focused on producing good code and has achieved >50% market share -- a number unequalled by any other open source project.

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