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Jacques Le Marois ...
According to the folks at Macmillan publishing, the Mandrake Linux distribution they sell was flying off shelves faster than Red Hat Linux this summer. And the Red Hat Linux-based Mandrake distribution is produced by Jacques Le Marois' company, MandrakeSoft.
Though some call Mandrake a "better Red Hat than Red Hat," the fact is that Le Marois' company has been sponsoring Linux development all along. Founder Gaël Duval is a Linux developer, and employee Daniel Duley is a core KDE contributor.
Now distributed in the U.S. by Macmillan, and with funding fromthe investment capital firm AXA Placement Innovation, MandrakeSoft is a company to watch in 2000.
Ransome Love ...
With strong connections to the reseller channel, one of the easiest installation routines around (Caldera's famous Lizard -- which stands for "Linux Wizard"), and rumored plans for a Year 2000 IPO, Caldera's Chief Executive Officer Ransome Love has been gathering steam in both the U.S. and Asian marketplaces. Caldera will certainly give other Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and TurboLinux -- as well as Microsoft Windows NT -- a run for their money.
Paul Mackerras ...
Along with holding a full-time academic position at the Australian National University, Mackerras co-authored the widely used ppp-2.2 code and LinuxPPC. The technical success of the latter is quite stunning; at a time when Microsoft's operating systems struggle to reach release quality on the single hardware architecture of 32-bit Intel processors, Linux has spread over an incredible range of CPUs, including very high-performance machines from IBM and Apple. Mackerras, along with fellow high-profile Australian developer Andrew Tridgell, now works for Linuxcare.
Rob Malda ...
When he started a little news-linking site called Chips and Dips back in 1997, nobody knew what Rob Malda was about to unleash. Well, Chips and Dips became Slashdot, and Slashdot is where many in the Linux community go when they want to get in touch with the community -- instantly. Malda, with his business partner Jeff Bates (Hemos) recently sold Slashdot to emerging open source media force Andover.net, and according to Cmdr Taco (Malda's alias), Slashdot will only get better.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison ...
Harrison is a senior software engineer for VA Research. He's most commonly known as Mandrake, author of the mandrake.net "Current News" diary and the major contributor to the Enlightenment window manager. Mandrake has worked on GNOME, gnome-perl, XFree86, and other elements that "make the Linux desktop suck less."
Trae McCombes ...
In the last five years, Trae McCombes has gone from being a computer-agnostic rock climber to the manager of one of the most important Web sites in the Linux universe, Linux. com. He was tapped by VA Linux, which actually owns the domain, to be site manager because of his infectious enthusiasm and ability to marshal armies of volunteers for the good of the Linux cause -- skills he proved to have while managing the themes. org Web site.
Pat McGovern ...
Many cite the first LinuxWorld Expo, held in March of 1999, as Linux's coming-of-age party. The show, which has fast become the largest Linux event there is, is the most prominent of the four areas in which McGovern's company, IDG, has had an impact on Linux. The other three, IDC (which has led the analyst firm pack in tracking Linux's phenomenal growth), IDG Books, and an online Webzine (also called LinuxWorld) have helped make IDG one of the most influential publishing companies in Linux. Of course McGovern may have had some help with his company's Linux strategy. His son, Pat Jr., is an employee of VA Linux Systems.
Larry McVoy ...
A former top scientist and software architect at Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, McVoy became a full-time open source developer when he realized the future of the software industry was at stake. McVoy is also a former boss of David Miller, one of the top Linux kernel hackers.
In 1998, McVoy formed a new company, called Bitkeeper, to develop a new distributed source management system he was writing out of concern that Linus Torvalds would reach burnout if he didn't have help in the management of the Linux kernel. Without Torvalds, McVoy fervently believed, the Linux movement would be seriously damaged. "I'm doing the four-year plan to help save Linus' brain from imploding," McVoy says.
Cliff Miller ...
Long dominant in the Japanese and Chinese markets, Cliff Miller's Linux distribution company, TurboLinux, Inc. is looking to tap into the North American markets.
The TurboLinux (formerly Pacific HiTech) distribution started out as a rebranded Red Hat, but TurboLinux adds its own enhancements, like clustering software. Miller is Turbo's president and CEO, and their minority investors include Intel and Broadview International.
David Miller ...
When Alan Cox gets a patch for Linux's TCP/IP code, he forwards it to David Miller. As well as being the arbiter of this important piece of networking code, Miller headed up the UltraPenguin (also called SparcLinux and UltraLinux, at different times) project to port Linux to Sparc CPUs, wrote a well-known document on the kernel's page-flush mechanism, introduced "fuzzy hashing" for certain memory accesses, and has done several other deep kernel fixes. He's also one of the guys who originally engineered the Cobalt Qube.
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