10 who matter in Open Source

You may not know them beyond a three-letter acronym. Or you might not know them at all, the seminal minds behind open-source software and development. Yes, while open-source is today all about shared development, somebody creates the kernels, the programming languages, the business philosophies. Below are a neat ten profiles of these sometimes shadowy figures who may be unknown to the world at large but whose absence would make it a much different world indeed.

• Born in 1955, Eric Allman is perhaps the oldest school on the list, entering the open-source annals with his development of delivermail at UC Berkeley as a student in the 70s and later sendmail as an adaptation to increasing mail-routing requirements  in the early 80s.
  Allman knew computing ran through his veins from an early age. A pair of widely-circulated stories (they may have first appeared online in Salon.com — ) about teen-aged Allman featuring him having “hacked into the source code of the refrigerator-size IBM 1401 mainframe at his high school” and constantly hanging around the Berkeley computing center well before getting admitted in 1973.

According to the official Unix history of sendmail, while Eric Schmidt’s BerkNet served as a network for ARPAnet and UCB’s UNIX project, mail could not move between networks via BerkNet. Allman wrote the delivermail program to address this issue, and the program was included in 4.0 and 4.1 BSD UNIX systems in 1979.
Sendmail hit the market in 1983 as part of 4.1c BSD UNIX as remains “the most relied-upon application of its kind.”

Allman went on to become CTO for Sift, Inc., to contribute as a senior developer at the International Computer Science Institute to neural network systems design, to co-author the “C Advisor” column for UNIX Review magazine, to serve on the Board of Directors of USENIX Association, and to participate as a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Review Board.
Allman most notably reappeared in industry headlines in 1998 when he announced the foundation of Sendmail Inc.,  representing perhaps the first company to produce software using the open-source model so familiar today.

In December of that year came beta versions of Sendmail Pro and Sendmail NT. In 2002, Sendmail was itself seriously hacked into, affecting source code for Sendmail 8.12.6. Allman is currently listed as Sendmail’s “Chief Science Offer,”  which is absolutely not at all a reference to Chief Science Offer Spock of Star Trek fame.
Allman is “openly gay” and thus his wikipedia entry carries an excellent ironic quote: “There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it’s basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That’s kind of funny.”

• Brian Behlendorf is a self-proclaimed member of “Generation PC,” beginning his blog’s introductory bio at a telltale age: “I was 11 in 1984 when Apple released its first Macintosh, but by then I was already using Logo on my public elementary school’s Apple II computers to draw sunsets and do word games. I had also spent many hours typing BASIC programs from Byte magazine into my TRS-80; mostly simple games, but sometimes programs that drew abstract pictures or a randomized seating chart for my 4th grade homeroom.”

On the way to becoming an Apache web server developer and a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, the group that first defined “open source” as a term, Behlendorf first rediscovered the fun in computers, seeing in the internet simplicity and potential for development. At UC Berkeley, Behlendorf wrote, “Pretty soon I was skipping classes to spend time reading IETF mailing lists and writing HTML by hand for fun and profit.

Out of having fun, and seeing how that fun could be applied to a set of real marketable skills, a career was born.”

Behlendorf’s online music resource www.SFraves.org and subculture website www.Hyperreal.org were created in 1992 and both still exist today. In 1993, Behlendorf became a co-founder of Organic, Inc., an agency which, according to Behlendorf’s wikipedia entry, was “the first business dedicated to building commercial web sites.”

At Organic, the breakthrough that got Behlendorf quickly to the top of the game was made. Behlendorf adapted the firm’s extant web server software with patched open-source code to support a project for Wired Magazine. (Behlendorf soon thereafter became the first Wired webmaster.)

Soon an electronic mailing list of those performing similar tasks to the NCSA codebase was created; these programmers wanted to create a server program that Microsoft and Netscape could not yet deliver.

In 1995, the Apache HTTP Server was released, based on the contributions of some 350 via the mailing list. By 1996, Apache was the no. 1 web server program. In 1997, Apache was installed at as many websites as Microsoft and Netscape products combined; none other than Bill Gates declared that year that “Apache is our biggest competitor.”  In 1999, the Apache project became the Apache Software Foundation.
The same year, Behlendorf co-founded CollabNet, were he still serves as chief technology officer. Behlendorf’s telling quote: “I use trial and error a little too much.”

• Free software can’t get free enough for Bruce Perens. Described as an “open-source evangelist and developer” (note the telltale word order there), Perens is also credited with status as the primary author of the Open Source Initiative’s “Open Source Definition”. Yet, Perens left the OSI less than one year after its formation. Why?

  It was a question of freedom.

  Wrote Perens in his 1999 email/essay “It’s time to talk about free software again”: “it’s time for us to start teaching … about Free Software. Notice, I said Free Software, not Open Source.

“Most hackers know that Free Software and Open Source are just two words for the same thing. Unfortunately, though, Open Source has de-emphasized the importance of the freedoms involved in Free Software. It’s time for us to fix that. We must make it clear to the world that those freedoms are still important, and that software such as Linux would not be around without them.”

Such statements go right to the heart of Perens’ philosophy, which, though he denies Richard Stallman’s extreme view that all software should be free, holds that freedom is tantamount in 21st century software.

To this end, Perens was former project leader of Debian GNU/Linux, founder of UserLinux, and creator of the non-profit “Software in the Public Interest” program.

He currently holds a position at SourceLabs. Perens is also the editor of the long “Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series” of books.

At this year’s Linux World Expo, Perens opined that “government CIOs are being scared away from the Open Format issue because
now they know that Microsoft will do its best to end their careers if
they even try.” For recent Perensisms on software and the law, check out his recent talk at University of Washington Shidler Center for Law, Commerce and Technology, some print received last year for jumping into the high-profile controversy involving Andrew Tridgell, Linus Torvalds, Bitkeeper software and Linux code, and tons of Perens’ words on his own site.

And it’s all free.

• “Want the story of my life?” reads Guido van Rossum’s web page, “read my résumé.” All right, then.

  Van Rossum’s life (or résumé) begins with the creation of the programming language known as Python, named for – you guessed it – Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The project started as a way to spend idle time.

  In Programming Python by Mark Lutz, Van Rossum wrote, “…in December 1989, I was looking for a ‘hobby’ programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas. My office (a government-run research lab in Amsterdam) would be closed, but I had a home computer, and not much else on my hands.

I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers.”

Back at the very beginning, Van Rossum graduated the University of Amsterdam with a Master’s in mathematics and computer science in 1982, then going to work at the Holland firm CWI.

There, Van Rossum developed ABC, a programming language and environment, a precursor to Python.

In 1986, Van Rossum started work on the Amoeba project at CWI. Van Rossum went on to be part of the CWI multimedia group.

From 1995 to February 1998, Van Rossum got a spot as guest researcher for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, later becoming an employee of CNRI. Grail, a web browser written in Python, was another pet project of his at that time.

Van Rossum put in stints at BeOpen.com, Zope Corporation, and Elemental Security before finally landing at Google. Van Rossum’s first Python program for Google, Mondrian, was released just last month. Jeez, with a résumé like that, who has time for a life?

• Yet another open sourcer to come of university with fresh grandiose ideas was Michael Tiemann. Tiemann’s autobiographical blurb on his homepage  starts his life at graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, followed the next year by the revelation that “GNU software was some of the best software to be found anywhere” and that “the GNU Manifesto was really a business plan in disguise.” (As for Tiemann’s contributions to GNU, he guides the curious to a convenient list)

Admitting to entrepreneurship but denying unapologetic capitalism, Tiemann co-founded Cygnus Solutions (née Cygnus Support) in 1992 in a story detailed in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, a tome that includes contributions from most of those appearing in this entry and more. In 1993, Cygnus made Fortune Magazine’s inaugural list of “25 Cool Companies” and by 1998 had made the Software 500, credited by Tiemann in part to “Tim O’Reilly, renowned publisher, entrepreneur, and open-source advocate put Programming with GNU Software in his Catalog.”

In 2001, Tiemann was one of the primary foci in the documentary Revolution OS. Today, Tiemann is keeping busy in capacities as Red Hat Inc. vice president of open source affairs; Open Source Initiative president; Embedded Linux Consortium board member; Jabber technical advisory board member; GNOME foundation advisory board member; and ActiveState Tool Corp. board of directors member.

• So some are “Benevolent Dictator for Life” and “Chief Science Officers.” Small potatoes! Linus Torvalds has been named “a hero to millions of coders”, the “world’s best known programmer”, one of the sixty most influential people in the last sixty years , and  “Leader of the free world.” Plus, how many open sourcers have an asteroid named for them?

  With Dickens-like prose of worn poverty does the story of Torvalds usually begin, Wired phrasing the “eureka” moment thusly: “At 21, wearing a ratty robe in a darkened room in his mother’s Helsinki apartment, Torvalds wrote the kernel of an operating system that can now be found inside a boggling array of machines and devices…”

The historic first announcement of Linux begins unassumingly, “Hello everybody out there using minix…” and is available in full at the Linux website.

Today, Torvalds’ baby Linux, thanks to improvements by tens of thousands of contributors, is everywhere online, in cell phones and on TiVo.

First posting the kernel for public improvement in 1991, by 2003 Linux had become prevalent enough that Goldman Sachs declared that “Linux will emerge as the dominant operating system in corporate data centers” in a study entitled “Fear the Penguin.”

The study touched off much protest from those unbelieving in open-source and, while Microsoft hasn’t taken the hit Goldman Sachs predicted it might, “dominant” is indeed the operative word for Torvalds’ creation these days.

Reads the Wired piece, “Linux has surely proved itself the most revolutionary software undertaking of the past decade.” While so many in the industry throw around the R-word, Torvalds is one who can honestly lay claim to the adjective.

• Everyone hates spam. Paul Vixie despises it. Today, Vixie does work with the Open Root Server Network project and along the way, he’s written SENDS, proxynet, rtty, Vixie cron and other RFCs and UNIX programs; he was the primary author/architect of domain name server BIND; he co-founded the Internet Software Consortium; he co-wrote Sendmail: Theory and Practice; he ran the consulting business Vixie Enterprises; and he co-founded the Palo Alto Internet Exchange in 1995.

  It may be the 1998 co-founding of the Mail Abuse Prevention System that endears him to the common computer user’s heart, however.

Simply put, MAPS is a California non-profit company, recently acquired by Trend Micro, with the ultimate goal of stopping “email abuse.”

In 2004, Vixie came off as quite the doom-sayer with regard to spam. In a Discourse.net piece entitled “Paul Vixie Prophesizes that Spam Spells Doom for DSL Users,” Vixie is quoted as predicting that “you’d better prepare for the inevitability of widespread filtering against your DSL/Cable blocks” and that “DSL/Cable is a fine access product, it’s better than a phone line & modem because it allows faster web surfing, movies/mp3/etc on demand, and soon VoIP. but no e-mail server anywhere can afford the risk of accepting e-mail or any other push-data from them. risk management, in this case, is going to come in the form of widespread e-mail rejection from all DSL/ Cable blocks.”

These days, Vixie’s favorite word, speaking as always in the milieu of security issues, is “monetize.” Over at his blog Flaming Mountainside, Vixie published a transcript of his recent talk to the California Commonwealth Club. “In what I call ‘meatspace’ (as against cyberspace, it’s where the meat is),” writes Vixie, “there’s a whole system of antitrust laws designed to prevent inappropriate monetization, where ‘inappropriate’ means ‘bad for the consumer’ which really means ‘in opposition to individual liberties." Vixie later went on to discuss property rights and digital technology. “Some of what I’ll say might seem a little bit paranoid, but please bear with me,” said Vixie.

It’s worth a read and nice to know Vixie’s on our side. Doesn’t everyone get a little paranoid sometimes?

• Larry Wall is a strange combination of linguist, Christian theologian and author. He is, of course, best known for his work in open source, specifically the creation of the language Perl while working for Unisys in 1987; his highly successful Programming Perl is now in its third edition. Also to his authorship are the rn Usenet client and Unix patch.

  Perl 6 has just recently been released, the culmination of Wall’s vision that, while Perl 5 was his rewrite of the language, he wanted Perl 6 to be “the community redesign of Perl,” thereby more like an actual living language.

  Wall is known by those in-the-know as a witty writer and humorist. His “State of the Onion Address,” “the annual speech wherein I ramble on about various things that are only marginally related to the state of Perl.

I’ve gotten pretty good at rambling in my old age,” is read by open-source hackers far and wide. Begun in 1996, these essays read like humorous contemporary blog posts, if only he’d write this stuff up, say, once a week. Nevertheless, the entire collection can be found at Perl.com with lots of other stuff on Wall’s own page.

• Back in the old days when we were throwing quarters into coin-operated video games at the arcade, dudes who ruled our universe – you know, those who were no. 1 on the list of High Scores on Asteroids or Missile Command – were all known by three letters: GUN and GLC and DRL and tons of AAA and LSD and SEX… perhaps you don’t know the name Jamie W. Zawinski.

Does “jwz” ring a bell?

According to his wikipedia entry,  Zawinski is “commonly known as jwz.” Probably not too surprising, seeing as how Zawinski was born in (maybe) 1971 yet already cracks an open-source “Who’s Who” list.

Running a nightclub as a day job (night job? hobby?), Zawinski gained a reputation by contributing computer programming skills to Mozilla, XEmacs and Netscape Navigator.

Necessity proved the mother of Zawinski’s invention: Working with Lucid Inc.’s C++ IDE, Zawinski and his team “were forced to begin making fundamental changes to GNU Emacs to add new functionality; tensions over how to merge these patches into the main tree eventually led to the famous GNU Emacs/Xemacs fork.”

Zawinski also goes down as having created Easter eggs in Netscape Navigator and Mozilla which connected to JWZ’s homepage. (Netscape has since exterminated these eggs. Zawinski fired back thusly.)

It was within the context of an interview question about the Easter eggs that JWZ showed his true colors: “Yes, such toys are ‘unprofessional,’” ranted the open-sourcer, “I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that’s not what I do. I’m a hacker, not an engineer.”

In 1999, JWZ resigned from Netscape Communications in disputes over making the Mozilla browser open source.

Netscape capitulated, but Zawinski “became disillusioned with the project when it was decided that the code would have to be rewritten,” as wikipedia would have it. Forbes magazine at that time opined that “programmers will happily craft code for open software that doesn’t belong to any one company – the Linux operating system or free Apache for Web servers – but they balk at helping the Netscapes of the world get richer.”

Today, Zawinski’s the 35-year-old owner of DNA Lounge. Not bad. He keeps up a LiveJournal if you’d live to keep up with him.

(For an alternative biography, check out Richard Stallman’s excellent blurb at the uncyclopedia.)

• “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Though known as “Linus’ Law” after Linus Torvald, it was Eric Raymond who coined the phrase that would later serve as a model for the open-source development system we take for granted today.
  More explicitly, Linus’ law states that “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.”
  A lot tidier in sound bite form, Linus’ law is at the heart of Raymond’s essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.

The piece, an “evolving essay,” is based mainly in Raymond’s work developing fetchmail and was first presented in 1997. The book-length version of the essay was published in 1999. As Raymond sees it, the titular edifices represent the ways in which code is developed. The cathedral model is one in which “source code is available with each software release, but code developed … is retricted to an exclusive group of developers.” The bazaar model is when “the code is developed over the internet in view of the public.”

Sure, Torvalds invented the process with his innocent little Linux kernel project, but Raymond set down the philosophy by which open-source technology exists and grows today. Raymond’s essay is the Declaration of Independence of open source. And the shot heard ‘round the world? Check out the infamous “Halloween Documents” consisting of Microsoft memoranda acquired by Raymond and released to the general public detailing just how worried the Microsoft brain trust is about open source. Pow!
Raymond resigned as the president of the Open Source Initiative in early 2005 and recently joined the Freespire Leadership Team.

As for the weirdness that surrounds the open-source genius lot? All right, Raymond calls himself a neopagan Libertarian anarcho-capitalist. His most noteworthy essays were entitled “Shut Up And Show Them The Code” and “Take My Job, Please!”

Raymond was also recently involved in a bit of a battle with Wikipedia over his biographical entry which touched on stuff like Raymond’s blog “Armed and Dangerous” which contains views like “blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population?” and that the Western powers “should embark on an imperialist military campaign to civilize the Muslim world.”