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The Linux Magazine Who's WhoFirst things first: Linux is a community effort. Thousands of people have contributed to making Linux what it is today, and thousands more will contribute toward what it becomes tomorrow.
But there are a some people who are undoubtedly having a significant impact on Linux. In Linux's grand tradition of putting technology first, most of these people are hackers, but there are also some business people and Linux advocates that are working hard to make Linux strong.
Because Linux doesn't really have a PR department, some of the amazing work being done by these people is not as well known as it should be. We hope that this list will go some distance toward rectifying that situation, and at the same time give us all a better sense of who we are as a community.
If you know of someone that should be added to the Linux Magazine Who's Who, let us know. We know there's no way we could get everyone we should on this list by ourselves.
Wichert Akkerman ...
In a world where Linux distribution vendors are now multi-billion-dollar companies, a noncommercial version of Linux is becoming more and more important. These days, Wichert Akkerman is responsible for the most prominent of noncommercial distributions, Debian, which only recently became available as a shrink-wrapped box. As a developer, Akkerman also handles such software packages as strace (a system call tracer) and A Package Tool (APT), which manages the package installation. Debian GNU/Linux continues to be a major hotbed of Linux innovation.
Jeremy Allison ...
Allison, along with Andrew Tridgell, is one of the lead developers of the Samba Windows file-and-print-sharing software that helps make Linux boxes such good NT servers. Allison, at the heart of open source development at SGI, Inc., helped shepherd the company firmly in the direction of Linux. He recently decidedto leave SGI in favor of VA Linux Systems.
Eric Allman ...
Most folks don't think of Eric Allman, the creator of sendmail and a self-confessed BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) bigot, when they think of Linux. But the fact is that e-mail is the single most indispensable service on the Net, and sendmail running on Linux delivers a large percentage of that e-mail. Most of those stories you've heard about a discarded 80386 machine being converted into an organization's most reliable e-mail server depended on the free availability of Linux along with sendmail.
Allman has been maintaining and documenting sendmail since he wrote its first release over 20 years ago. Last year, frustrated with the lack of funding for such a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure, Allman started his own company (an open source business case study), Sendmail, Inc., which produces both open-sourced and proprietary versions of sendmail.
Andrea Arcangeli ...
Though he does his hacking from the town of Imola, Italy, it is German Linux powerhouse SuSE that employs Arcangeli as a kernel developer. Among his creations are the IKD kernel debugging tool and the workaround for a famous TCP incompatibility between Solaris and Linux. Arcangeli's specialty these days is the area of memory management.
Larry Augustin ...
Is there a cult of "Larry" at VA Linux Systems? Employees there deny it, but there's an almost eerie way that anyone who works for VA will suddenly light up and say the same three words -- "Larry is great" -- any time you ask what they think of their CEO. Augustin co-founded VA back in 1994, passing on a chance to be one of the founders of Yahoo! (though he did co-author the Yahoo! business plan). Well, Larry may have the last laugh, depending upon the success of VA's Initial Public Offering.
Donald Becker ...
Donald Becker, a staff scientist with the Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS), hasplayed a critical role in the development of low-cost, high-performance parallel computing as the chief investigator of the Beowulf Project. Becker has written enhancements to the kernel network subsystem to support faster I/O on high-speed networks, device drivers for countless Ethernet cards, and a distributed shared-memory package. If you use a net-working card, there's a good chance its driver was written by Donald Becker.
Brian Behlendorf ...
It may be that Apache is the poster child of the open source revolution. The vast majority of Web servers use it, and like sendmailit's proven to be one of the killer applications driving the adoption of Linux.
While the Apache organization operates as a fairly large partnership, Behlendorf is the one co-founder who is most visible in public. O'Reilly & Associates currently employs him as CTO of new technology. He also founded Collab.Net this year. It is a for-profit company whose first project is the sourceXchange open source developer clearinghouse.
Michael Cowpland ...
Cowpland is CEO, founder, and president of Corel (COwpland REsearch Laboratories) Corporation. Though Corel's latest efforts have been directed at making Linux into an easier-to-use desktop OS (see In the Trenches, pg. 20), they did, for a time, toy with the idea of becoming a Linux hardware company. Last year, though, Corel sold off its Netwinder hardware division in return for an equity stake in Rebel.com, which continues to produce the nifty little Netwinder boxes.
Alan Cox ...
Cox is Linux hacker number two. Next to Linux founder Linus Torvalds, he is the guy with the most responsibility for kernel development. He's famous for turning around dozens of kernel patches and questions every single day, and perhaps even more so for his public, Webified diary (http//www.linux.org.uk/diary).
Red Hat employs Cox and his consulting firm, Building Number Three, as contractors. Cox says his job at Red Hat is to be the guy to whom, at the end of the day, Red Hat's big-league clients can simply say, "Okay, it's broken. Fix it."
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