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Tim O'Reilly ...
It's hard to overstate O'Reilly's importance to the Linux community. O'Reilly & Associates (ORA), the publishing company he founded, has the best brand among all computer publications (they put out the "funny animal" books), and several ORA volumes are the definitive references for particular aspects of Linux.
ORA promotes open source in general through such activities as its Open Source Conferences. O'Reilly himself has co-authored some of the longest-living books on Linux developers' shelves, including Termcap andTerminfo,Unix Power Tools, and theDefinitive Guides to the X Window System. ORA also employs a couple of other people on this list: Brian Behlendorf and Larry Wall.
Jon Prial ...
IBM has become a quite a player in the Linux world. It employs leading open source developers working on Linux, Apache, PHP, Java, and more; it supports projects to port Linux to its hardware; and it offers support contracts for Linux users. As much as anyone, Jon Prial is at the center of this activity. Prial has broad responsibilities for marketing IBM's Linux capabilities, including "channel" relations (staying in touch with resellers) and press activities. While Prial began as a programmer more than two decades ago, he's worked on the sales and marketing sides since 1981.
Daniel Quinlan ...
Quinlan is chairman of the Linux Standards Base. The LSB is an attempt to define compatibility standards for Linux distributions -- a project that many feel will be of crucial importance as Linux develops and the threat of divergent standards becomes more pressing. Transmeta, the rather secretive company that holds patents apparentlyaimed at competingwith Intel in production of CPUs, employs both Quinlan and Linus Torvalds.
Eric Raymond ...
Raymond is the chief evangelist for Open Source. There's no such position, of course, but there's also no denying who should hold it. His paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," on how programmers develop Linux and other Open Source projects, inspired Netscape in early 1998to release the source code for its Mozilla Internet browser.
After working with Richard Stallman and others for twenty years on "free" and "public domain" software, he deliberately came up with a new name that minimizes software's "hip-pie and hacker" associations. He's spent the past two years explaining Open Source to large organizations, and explaining corporate motivations to fellow programmers.
Paul "Rusty" Russell .
"Rusty" Russell authored the current packet-filtering portion of the kernel, the "IP firewall chains," as well as its ipchains rule-specifier. Like Alan Cox and Andrew Tridgell, he keeps a public diary on the Web. He warmed up to his Linux kernel career with several fixes to the GNU g++ compiler.
Sunil Saxena ...
Spell Linus backwards and you get Sunil. Sunil Saxena, that is -- head of Intel's Microcomputer Software Labs, and Linus Torvalds' key contact at the chip giant. Saxena has spearheaded Intel's efforts to work closely with Linux developers, interacting with most of the major Unix companies that do business with Intel and putting much effort into ensuring that their forthcoming Itanium chip (Merced) will be finely tuned for Linux, and vice versa, when the processor hits the market.
Richard Stallman ...
RMS, as most developers know him, is the archetypical hacker whose skills are legendary. Tales are still told of programs he's written that were better than those cranked out by whole teams of competitors.
He is the founder of the Free Software Foundation, and also of the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) project. The GNU's project has as its goal the creation of an entirely freely redistributable OS and associated utilities. The license that protects the freedom of the GNU project (and Linux by association) is the GNU GPL (General Public License), which guarantees that all software released under its auspices will always remain free.
Oh, by the way, he says we should call this GNU/Linux Magazine.
Daryll Strauss ...
Strauss is famous for being the guy who chose and maintained Linux for the render farm on the motion-picture Titanic. He started writing 3D drivers for Linux about two years before anyone else, writing -- among other things -- the 3D Mesa support for Voodoo graphics cards. He currently maintains PrecisionInsight's 3Dfx hardware implementation for Linux.
Michael Tiemann ...
An accomplished programmer and successful executive, Tiemann was one of the original authors of the GNU C++ compiler. Ten years ago he co-founded Cygnus Support (now Cygnus Solutions) to commercialize support for the GNU compiler, debugger, and editor: gcc, gdb, and Emacs.
Along with his managerial responsibilities, Tiemann still programs actively.
Marc Torres ...
Torres is president of both the North American operations of SuSE, Inc., and also of the popular Atlanta Linux Showcase. He is known for having fondly referred to Linus Torvalds as a "benevolent dictator" in one public discussion of open source's successes and failures. Torres, who reports to SuSE CEO Roland Dyroff, has the job of making Europe's most popular Linux distribution a success in America.
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