Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Editorial

Unsung Heroes of Open Source 164

Posted by Zonk from the working-to-support-industry,-commerce,-and-the-american-way! dept.
Yosef writes "Jon Udell uses his experience from using and hacking the free software BitPim to say that developers of such less-known projects are the true heroes of open source: 'For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Unsung Heroes of Open Source More

Unsung Heroes of Open Source

Comments Filter:

  • So true... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VegetableMatter ( 862887 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:50PM (#11789012)
    When it comes to open-source, Mozilla and Linux get all the glory. But it's this guy [sephiroth.it] and his amazing SEPY text editor that make my life the joy that it is!

    • Re:SEPY (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anomalyst ( 742352 )
      SEPY is a flash debugger. Why would anyone on /. want to encourage or faclitate the creation of flash content?
      • Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com].

      • Re:SEPY (Score:3, Funny)

        by Zorilla ( 791636 )
        SEPY is a flash debugger. Why would anyone on /. want to encourage or faclitate the creation of flash content?

        Sure. Flash is only used to annoy the fuck out of you - and the exclusive purpose of VCRs is to flagrantly infringe on media producers' precious IP. Hypocrites.

        Get off you VT100 and come join us in this century.

        • Re: this century (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anomalyst ( 742352 )
          Actually I prefer to be in the next century when "intent to deceive" laws are strictly enforced and violators receive a lifetime incarceration in the moon.
          I have yet to encounter a flash presentation with all the useless twirling geometrics, gradient colors (yeth, Doktor Frankenstein, yeth. We must add gradient colors. Hmpf, hmpf.) and a barrage of MTV-style image cuts that were shot from odd perspectives that could not have been improved upon by a simple black on white hyperlinked bullet list.
          I don't want

  • Thanking the developers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nadamsieee ( 708934 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:50PM (#11789015)
    We could all thank them by donating a buck or two to their projects.
    • Actually, The BitPim developer(s) don't accept financial contributions...

      http://www.bitpim.org/testhelp/contributing.htm
    • I can and do donate to F/OSS [northwestern.edu]. You usually get a tax deduction out of the deal, but it is also feels good to give money to those who have done such good work. Having been on the receiving end of this, it also feels great when people acknowledge your work.

      I'll definitely be adding more projects to the list of who I will donate to after reading this article. If anyone can help me figure out where to send money to, please post to the email listed on my page or post under this thread.

    • Re:Thanking the developers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:19PM (#11789588) Homepage Journal
      In most cases they would be more grateful for a neat patch with some feature, for some words of praise, and especially with success stories of their software.
      I wrote this [interia.pl] little piece of crap. Okay, it got obsoleted really fast, it does the job but isn't anything great and there's practically no audience. But then I found this [linuxfr.org] blog entry (fish link [altavista.com]) and felt really special :) It's what makes such projects great, people's gratitude. Not money. Just the fact that you're the hero.
    • I would say that giving a hundred bucks would work better. Or gift vouchers. 1$ donations may work if you have millions of users. But if the product is a niche one, but very-very-very useful to you, consider giving a noticeable contribution. Consider how much the commercial software costs - from tens to hundreds of dollars. Why then do you believe that giving just a few dollars is sufficient for open source projects?

      Seriously, considering that only very few people donate to small projects, if you want to m

  • Different Perspectives (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:52PM (#11789030)
    What Jon Udell calls a "List of Unsung Heroes", Microsoft calls a "Hit List".

  • YOU can also be a hero! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:53PM (#11789033) Homepage Journal
    Do you use Linux? Know how to code?

    If so, then you can be a hero too. I never paid for software in the form of money, I personally feel it is alright to spend some of the saved money in the form of personal time when I find bugs, missing features and so on. Sadly, I am not a very experienced programmer, but I have managed to get some small patches into Open Source projects.

    This is how you can be a hero also, even if it is just a line of code - the sum of all small snippets like that does eventually help the evolution of Open Source.

    So skilled or not, you can be a hero too! Some are great big heros, but even if you just translated a text string, fixed a few lines or code, or just made some graphics -- then you are a small hero (in my eyes) also!

    • The ONE thing I take away, having read your post.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:00PM (#11789075)
      You've never seen MY code.

      My code is like my handwriting, I know what it's about at the time, but no one, myself included, can decipher it if it comes up again.

    • Re:YOU can also be a hero! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by omicronish ( 750174 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:09PM (#11789129)

      Do you use Linux? Know how to code? If so, then you can be a hero too.

      A lot of people equate open source with Linux, but there's quite a lot of it for Windows and other operating systems as well. Firefox, Mozilla, Eclipse, Python, and Mono all run on Windows. SourceForge lists over 10,000 projects for Windows. In fact, I'm a Windows user who wouldn't be able to live without Python, Bitlbee, Subversion, and wget.

      So Windows users who are interested, join in on the fun. OSS isn't limited to Linux users.

    • You don't need to code to help out OSS.

      Finding bugs, fix spelling mistakes, doing thorough reviews or usability studies, translating help into different languages or even setting you granny up with Linux all go to help OSS.

      I think the translates do a Gem of a job, and make OSS accessible to a huge proportion of the world.
    • This is something I find really amazing about Linux and probably the reason why it _will_ eventually take a huge bite out of MS's bottom end: This attitude of a holy war against MS, closed source software, or even just the love of coding.

      I'm just learning the ins-and-outs of programming right now and haven't always intended on becoming part of the muscle behind Linux or supporting OSS software. However, what convinced me to join the crusade someday was when I read about "trust chips" that would be put in
      • A holy war will never impact the The Borg's bottom line. Better software will.

        MSFT isn't, though, lying down. It will fight FLOSS on both the legal and technical fronts, and there will be (metaphoric) blood spilt.

        • Uh-hunh (Score:2)

          by hawk ( 1151 )
          You just show me a printout or computer that doesn't show an "impact" when run through with a two-handed sword . . . :)


          hawk, apparently adovcating a real holy war,

    • Can I use my not-so-Mad Rhyming Skillz to translate some documentation for Ubuntu? I had a really really old soundblaster-compatible card that needed some hocus pocus ALSA config stuff that took me a week to figure out with the help of google and people posting oodles of info. (ok, hocus pocus to me, but I figure the rest of you think it's damn simple)

      So I was in despair
      In need of a good driver
      Swimming 'round Google
      like a clueless scuba diver

      I'm a cheap bastard
      and I ain't droppin' thirty
      On an audigy tha

    • Re:YOU can also be a hero! (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I love open source and i don't give a crap about Linux. The fact that i have such good software like firefox, open office on windows represents one more reason not to dual boot.

  • Michael Elkins (Score:5, Insightful)

    by defile ( 1059 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:54PM (#11789035) Homepage Journal

    All mail clients suck, mutt just sucks the least.

  • Where are they all hiding? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Glowing Fish ( 155236 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:54PM (#11789039) Homepage
    I know a lot more open source developers than the average person. (although perhaps not more than the average Slashdotter), and I can't figure out how there can be enough of them to keep all these projects floating.
    For example, how many people were neccesary to put together libsdl-sound1.2 which is one of tens of thousands of packages hiding in the Debian repository, which is just a small piece of all open source projects.
    Where are all these open source developers hiding? Is this what my bus driver does when they aren't at work?
    • Is this what my bus driver does when they aren't at work?

      Somehow I doubt it [cbs2chicago.com]

    • Re:Where are they all hiding? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zarf ( 5735 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:50PM (#11789384) Journal
      I would guess that a great number of OSS projects are driven by people who need things for work, but whose work isn't exclusivley demanding ownership of their code. Small shops that need probelms solved that are very nearly solved already... and can spare a developers time to solve them... and won't be hurt by releasing the code. That's the idea I get in my mind.

      For example, I'm considering making contributions to several projects myself. My contributions may be tiny but they may help to add up to a real finished product. It's all about the aggregate contributions of the many many tiny improvements people make adding up to make major differences... Open Source projects build up the same way civilisation does. Millions of small contributions over time.

      I'm probably wrong but it sounds good to me...

      So stop reading slashdot and go code something.
      • Wow the necessity is the mother of inventory (or scratching the itch) explaination for open source is still popular? I've found that the vast majority of open source projects are started by people who had "some interest" in coding what they started coding. It's not because they've got work to do and can't find anything to do it (if you've got work to do you do the damn the work, you don't sit down and write tools so you can do it better), it's because they wanted to enjoy themselves coding something that
        • if you've got work to do you do the damn the work, you don't sit down and write tools so you can do it better

          True story: I have this job. I write code. Much of this job ended up writing the same types of programs over and over again. So I got tired of writing the same thing over and over again and I wrote a tool to do my job better. The Objects I wrote allow me to make a program in a few minutes that used to take several days to create.

          If I worked with the attitude that I don't get paid to make tools

  • Making technical information available (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Husgaard ( 858362 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:54PM (#11789040)
    The interesting point he is making here is that FOSS people not only write software - they also make obscure technical information available and accessible.

  • Life is easier due to them (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SunFan ( 845761 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:56PM (#11789047)

    I remember using gnuplot to make great EPS (encapsulated PostScript) graphs for papers in college. I'm not sure of a better way to put nice charts into LaTeX documents. Even the developers of LaTeX modules for things like rotated charts with regular headers and footers deserve a share of credit.

    • GNUplot. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Grendel Drago ( 41496 )
      Yes, I too know the delights of gnuplot for graphs, and the usage of make to smush together twenty graphs and diagrams (mmm, dia) into one LaTeX output document.

      Have you seen WikiTeX [wikisophia.org]? It allows for direct inclusion of graphviz, gnuplot, LaTeX and LilyPond directly into a wiki page. (It's a MediaWiki extension.) You lose the excellent typesetting, but man is it ever quick and easy.

      --grendel drago

  • Recognition helps (Score:2, Insightful)

    by karvind ( 833059 )
    Recognition always helps. An earlier Slashdot story [slashdot.org]

  • Here are my unsung heroes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:57PM (#11789054) Homepage

    I would say the gentleman behind HT Track [httrack.com] is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit [chami.com] team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous [slashdot.org] "unsung heroes of open source" article).

    • I have a similar story with a small dockapp called wmfuzzy [manicai.net] that displays a time string.

      When I switched to OpenBSD on a laptop, it didn't work. I informed the author, and he rewrote some code so it would. I tested it, found a few bugs, and told them of it. Although I couldn't code C at the time, I could read the asset reports and change the system clock so that the bugs would trigger.

      Its a great feeling to submit a bug report in the morning and by the next day have a patched version of the code to

    • And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. HTML-Kit is a very nice program, but since when did it become open source?
    • My vote goes to Ben Pasero of RSSOwl [sourceforge.net]. When I had some setup issues with RSSOwl, he was really helpful and stuck with me till I was up and running (a Gmail search of that conversation reveals no less than *14* messages).

  • Just one example? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2005 @03:58PM (#11789061)
    BitPim is the only example in that story? I was expecting to see a top 10 list of unsung heroes, but he just writes about one niche piece of software he found useful. You can find more in the average Slashdot article's comments.

  • Roger Binns no longer unsung (Score:3, Interesting)

    by osewa77 ( 603622 ) <naijasms.gmail@com> on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:01PM (#11789082) Homepage
    John Udell, by writing this post, has just succeeded on bringing one unsung hero - Roger Binns - out of obscurity. Well done, John!!

    • Roger Binns responds ... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The funny thing is that none of my friends would call me unsung or obscure :-)

      As someone else quoted we do not accept money, kickbacks or other forms of financing for BitPim. This is simply because it creates issues. Firstly some initial amount of that will be squandered on dealing with the tax situation it creates. Secondly it creates certain expectations. For example if someone donates and mentions they primarily use a particular operating system, then they wouldn't expect us to drop support for that
      • No Roger, you're not unsung or obscure.

        You're just a git :-).

        To those who don't know, Roger Binns is responsible for Samba having the fastest share-mode lock code possible, as he goaded me into doing it by claiming it required a lock daemon. I was determined to prove him wrong... :-).

        Roger is also responsible for VisionFS (the *old*, good SCO's decent SMB file/print server).

        Plus he holds a mean barbequeue :-). Even though his taste in toenail polish is *deplorable* :-).

        Jeremy.
  • Developers, Developers, Developers!!!

  • Absolutely true (Score:4, Interesting)

    by robertjw ( 728654 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:13PM (#11789158) Homepage
    While I think that many of us do owe these big names like Linus, etc... I know that personally I owe much more to many of the 'unsung heros'. Guys like: and many others. The big projects help us get things done, but the small projects make the big projects barable.

  • Heroes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SassyDave ( 557868 )
    I'll bet there are hundreds of open source developers scouring these posts right now to see if they show up on someone's list.

  • There are many fringe benefits (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:24PM (#11789231)
    For example, how many commercial software development jobs come with benefits like this [sourceforge.net] ?
  • [Joke: something about unsung heroes being sung about makes them sung heroes and therefore you can't sing an unsung heroes song about them.]

    [close with formula joke]
  • Salutes are all well and good, but how about some money?

  • My Hero is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2005 @04:45PM (#11789355)
    My personal hero in the Open Source community is Bill Gates. He has done so much to spur to growth of good software and open source its hard not to pay some tribute to this man.
    • My personal hero in the Open Source community is Bill Gates. He has done so much to spur to growth of good software and open source its hard not to pay some tribute to this man.

      after all, if microsft was gone, who would be there for the open source community to emulate?
    • Such an insightful comment - I bet you wished you'd posted under you own sig.

      That aside, I genuinely think MS has blown its load. It knows it and, like a cornered tiger, it'll fight to the bitter end.

      Much blood will be spilled.

      Such is the nature of the universe.

      However, and mark my words, MS is nearing its end...and I ain't talking about Marks & fucking Sparks, either.

      To be frank, I don't give a fuck whether you agree or not - it stands as a prediction as long as /. stands as a bastion of free spe

  • another one (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Avishalom ( 648759 )
    Alex Shapiro [touchgraph.com] of 'touchgraph [touchgraph.com]' fame [sourceforge.net]
  • Open Source Application that I release publicly. I use Fedora Core, and release apps for network configuration and automation for free. I dont ask for anything ;) just hope that people enjoy it and find it useful.
  • Many developers I know began writing code in college and compiling using gcc for MUDs. Most popular MUDs in my circles were DikuMUD based derived from the work of Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt. (The creator fo CircleMUD, Jeremy Elson, also deserves a mention in my opinion too.) Freely available MUD code helped promote using open source software. I and many of my friends had our first introduction to Linux by finding a OS to run our MUD since we were g
  • McGrath is the head developer of the GNU C Library [gnu.org], which is an absolute necessity for an entirely F/OSS system.

  • Duncan Booth (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rekrutacja ( 647394 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:52PM (#11789865) Homepage
    Duncan Booth is supporting Nethack port for Psion computers (do you remeber them?) for years. Only small fraction of people (Psion users which are Nethack lovers too) will ever notice value of his work. But for us, Nethack addicts which happen to be also Psion users, he is an ultimate hero. Check it: http://www.suttoncourtenay.org.uk/duncan/Nethack.h tm [suttoncourtenay.org.uk]

    I'm sure you can find such people everywhere. Whatever obscure activity you undertake, or whatever strange problem happens to you, you sooner or later meet your hero. I mean - this is how free software works, isn't it?
  • Top on my list is the development team behind the open support of the Linksys NSLU2.

    Jim Buzbee was one of the first with his articles on Tom's hardware on Hacking the NSLU2 [tomsnetworking.com].

    There are now a number of developers that have extended the abilities and have added over 50 applications packages. You can see their work at the NSLU2 Wiki. [nslu2-linux.org] They rock! Thanks guys!!!

  • It's like high school all over again. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:03PM (#11789928) Homepage Journal
    It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.

    What I'm about to say is probably not going to be taken well, but here goes anyway: Slashdot is probably the "football team / cheerleading squad" of the open source high school -- the place where the coolest of the cool get the most concentrated doses of glory and attention. There are certain people (whose names I shall not defame in this post, lest I get moderated down to -99 or something) who could make a stupid remark about how they think it would be better if people didn't wear matching shoes, and Slashdot would run half a dozen stories about it.

    The best example of unsung heroes might be Linas Vepstas [linas.org]. He wasn't one of the "cool kids" so the world pretty much ignored his project, which was to port Linux to IBM mainframes -- he actually got it working, for the most part. IBM ignored his work and went it alone, and nobody knows much about Linas Vepstas now.

    Unsung heroes indeed. Let's all try to avoid making open source a fashion show. Most of our best technology was built by nerds, and nerds aren't known for their social skills.

    • It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.

      No. Writing open source software isn't about popularity. There may be people that do it for the glory, people that need the application for themselfs, people that get paid f

  • So why don't we do something about it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jalefkowit ( 101585 ) <jason@@@jasonlefkowitz...com> on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:08PM (#11789948) Homepage

    The Slashdot audience is probably better positioned to recognize the true "unsung heroes of OSS" than anyone else.

    So -- hey editors, you listening? -- why don't we have a monthly nomination for Unsung Hero of the Month? Let readers send in their candidates, along with a pitch for why they should be featured as an Unsung Hero; then have the editors pick the best pitch, and give that developer a front-page interview on Slashdot.

    Heck, maybe even throw in some ad space for his/her project (we're all in this OSS thing together right?). You could probably even have a corporate sponsor pick up the tab for the ad space (the cost would be pretty low, and you could offer them naming rights -- make it, say, the "IBM Open Source Unsung Hero of the Month").

    Then archive the interviews in a section of their own (just like "Developers", "Your Rights Online", etc.) so that once there's a bunch of these in the archives they can serve as a kind of Hall of Fame.

    This would help introduce people to a whole range of great OSS projects they might otherwise never discover, and give the developers the "ego payment" that for so many folks is the only real reimbursement they get for their hard work...

    • That is a bad idea, though your heart is in the right place. There are just too many of them.

      It is trivial to keep hero of the month busy for years, just taking the major contributors to kde [kde.org] who aren't recognized outside of the kde developer comunity. Now toss in the GNOME developers, the x.org developers, various Linux developers, netBSD, freeBSD, battle for Wesnoth, nethack and you have filled a lifetime of months touching many deserving hackers, but missing the large majority of both hackers and wor

      • Re:Maybe of the day (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jalefkowit ( 101585 )

        The idea isn't to recognize every single worthy hacker out there. It's to recognize many worthy hackers who would otherwise never get recognition.

        Even if you do this for years and only cover less than 1% of the total number of deserving hackers, you're still helping promote a huge number of great projects, which is a net win no matter how you slice it. Of course you're not going to be able to cover everybody. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

        And I would argue that if something like this

        • if something like this ends up focusing primarily on people contributing to projects like KDE, GNOME, etc. it'd be missing the point.

          That was a large part of my point: it is too easy to miss many good projects because things like KDE and GNOME are great and have plenty that deserve recognition that you could cover only those two projects and not get into the hard work of finding other worthy projects. (There are plenty of unworthy projects, though most have little source code)

  • I add: Donald Becker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WMD_88 ( 843388 ) <kjwolff8891@yahoo.com> on Saturday February 26, 2005 @07:53PM (#11790714) Homepage Journal
    The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things. You need that NIC support, after all! ;)
    • I add : Donald Becker
      The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things.
      I see you've never read or tried to maintain any of DB's code. :-) Seriously though -- it's a prolific and essential contribution. Bravo!

  • (who you can see here [sourceforge.net]).

    This allowed me to get my machine connected back onto WiFi after switching to Linux. Thanks, guys.

  • Jesse Vincents [fsck.com] who took req and ran with it to develop RT [bestpractical.com].

    Thank you, sir.
  • "Hey babe, come up and see my FOSS project" hasn't exactly been my most successful line.

  • My unsung hero (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quattro Vezina ( 714892 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @02:30AM (#11792829) Journal
    Joe Allen, the creator of Joe's Own Editor [sourceforge.net] (JOE), my favourite text editor.

    It has the perfect balance of simplicity and power. Thank you, Joe!
  • Gerard of Linux from Scratch [osuosl.org] is my Open Source Hero! He thought me how to make my own Linux Distro [blogspot.com] and the support he provides by jumping into the list and patienty and accurately identifying the problem was too good. Once I got a reply from him over the mistake I had made, I felt certain that problem is gonna solve now. WIth so far I have observed Gerard has been very friendly, understanding. Some Linux guys are not so humble with their Linux undertakings and they tend to believe that they are doing some

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Close