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legend free software faces

Although we bit into it, behind a program is a programmer who created it. Normally, we only remember him when they fail and lose what we were doing. In the Open Source movement also there are many faces; some ring us more than others, but all have contributed their bit to the many open source projects that exist today. In this article we review 15 of these faces, in our view, have made it possible for free software is increasingly important.

• Richard Stallman Talk

  is free software Richard Stallman talk , American programmer who founded the Free Software Foundation (1985). At MIT he made his first steps as a hacker. A owe Stallman GNU Project (1995) and the GPL (1989), in addition to the GCC compiler (1985). Today is dedicated to conducting lectures around the world by enacting the benefits of free software and released a short time each controversial statement in the press. Linus Torvalds

• Another name synonymous with free software. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux (1991), the largest project and has become the leading open source alternative to the mighty Windows and Mac OS X. The Finn was inspired by Minix (1987) to create a version of Unix for personal computers more accessible to the public. A owe Torvalds Linux Kernel joined the GNU project and Linux Foundation International . Currently coordinates the project. Dennis Ritchie

• Although not directly part of the open source movement, Dennis Ritchie was involved in the design and development of UNIX, Minix source Linux and later. He also developed the C language
Andrew S.

• Tanenbaum

  To understand the origin of Linux also have to remember Andrew S. Tanenbaum responsible for Minix (1987), a free version of UNIX and reduced. Your project Linus Torvalds took the idea to create the Linux kernel. Marc Ewing

• In 1992 he founded the software company Red Hat, responsible for one of the major Linux distributions and other equally important developments. Red Hat is one of the companies most important free software present in the bag. Ian Murdock

• When it comes to Red Hat we also talk about Debian . The German Ian Murdock wrote the Debian Manifesto (1993), the project arises from creating what today is one of the major Linux distributions. He was also the first leader of the project. Matthias Ettrich

• is not as well known as Stallman and Torvalds, but he must LyX editor (1995) and the KDE project (1996), a leading desktop environment for Linux also use the open versions of BSD.

• Miguel de Icaza

  And speaking of KDE, why not talk about GNOME, the graphical environment and other main which was created by the project in 1997 titled, founded among others by Mexican Miguel de Icaza . A Miguel de Icaza you must also file manager Midnight Commander , the Gnumeric spreadsheet , Bonobo and platform Mono, a free alternative to. NET Microsoft. In recent times it has been frowned upon by the open source community because it works at Microsoft and supports controversial initiatives such as standard Microsoft Office Open XML.

• Mark Shuttleworth is one of the biggest names in open source panorama Canonical to found (2004) and funding the Ubuntu project (2004), the most popular distribution for newcomers to Linux. South Africa's Shuttleworth owe the popularization of Linux through the promotion, despite some controversy. Brian Behlendorf

• This Californian is the father of Apache (1995), the most popular HTTP server, open source and has its own free license. In addition to having founded the Apache Software Foundation and to promote free software, Brian Behlendorf is part of the Mozilla Foundation, the foundation responsible for Firefox, among others. Michael Widenius

• is author Michael Widenius MySQL (1995), a large database of open source.
• is currently developing MariaDB , a fork of MySQL, in his own company, AB Monty Program.
• Guido van Rossum
  Dutchman Guido van Rossum is the author of the Python programming language (1991), which has served many developers build their applications free. Currently, he coordinates and sets the tone for developments of this language, in addition to working at Google. Rasmus Lerdorf

• This programmer is responsible for the programming language PHP (1995), present in many web pages. Also contributed to Apache and mSQL, and currently works in WePay and holds conferences on open source worldwide.

• Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly is a theorist, promoter of free software and coined the term Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly also owe the Perl language, which helped develop and O'Reilly Media, the largest publisher in the dissemination and publication on technology and computing. Lawrence Lessig

• Finally, we quote from Lawrence Lessig, head of the Creative Commons initiative. For this, the lawyer and professor of American law created a foundation with the same name and is responsible for providing support for this alternative to license Copyright inspired, in turn GPL.