Beyond Stallman

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Beyond Stallman":
> There are probably a lot of other folks out there who it would be worth 
> our while to speak to. I wrote the list after I happened to read LWN for 
> about 30 seconds. That's not much consideration.
> 
> The real question for discussion here is who are the people of influence 
> in the international Open Source community with whom we should talk?

I think that if you need to open Google, Wikipedia, or LWN to find these
people, there are, regretfully, not as influencial as Richard Stallman -
whose name everyone (I assume) has heard.

Selfishly, I would considered someone to be influencial if he or she
influenced *me*, in my starting to use free software, in my starting to
write free software, or in the free software I use daily.

Richard Stallman is an obvious candidate, but we are boycotting him ;-)

Tim O'Reilly is influencial because he edits and publishes many books about
free software, and especially this one:
	http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html
which had a huge effect on my own starting to write (not just use) free
software.  He was also the first one to coin the new term "open source".

Linus Torvals is of course super influencial.

Chris DiBona is interesting for several reasons, but among other things he
co-edited the above mentioned book, and he's Google's free software guru.
Eric Raymod is another influencial person.

Arnold Robbins, who will speak in August Penguin, maintains gawk, which is
certainly not as well known as these other people, but nevertheless will
be interesting because I use this program.

And of course there are the usual Unix suspects (Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan,
etc.), Marc Andreessen (NCSA mosaic and Netscape), Bill Joy ("vi" and Sun)
and many other people who influenced my computer-using life and I'd like
to hear :-)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Monday, Jul 18 2011, 16 Tammuz 5771
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Sorry, but my karma just ran over your
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |dogma.