eWeek recently took at look at the top 15 open source business influencers, which includes the usual suspects like Linus Torvalds and Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin. It also named some people that typically get overlooked, like Bank of America's Tim Golden who "worked exclusively with Linux and open-source software in several multimillion-dollar enterprise initiatives." While there's no way a list of only 15 people can be all-inclusive, a few readers were bothered that some big names were left off the list entirely, prompting Ziff Davis Enterprise's Editor at Large Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols to explain why.
Naturally, some were mystified that Richard M. Stallman -- considered by some to be the father of free software -- wasn't on the list. Vaughn-Nichols points out that while Stallman is indeed well known in the open source community, he "has never liked the term 'open source' or many of its ideas" and therefore woudn't even want to be on a list of this sort.
Vaughn-Nichols also noted that Bruce Perens, co-founder of Open Source Initiative, was left off the list because he's been out of the spotlight for a while -- though Perens is attempting to change that.
Besides Torvalds, the list is made up primarily of business people like Bank of America's Golden, Apache's co-founder Jim Jagielski, and SugarCRM's CEO, John Roberts. As one commenter noted, "If someone who knows nothing on the subject reads this presentation he might think that the whole thing was the idea of some managers and investors." Point taken but, of course, this was meant to be a list of people in the business world so its lack of engineers and developers makes sense.
Who makes your list of the top open source business influencers?
Comments
Add CommentBy on Mar. 31, 2008
I would actually add Steve Ballmer to this list and here's why. If Microsoft wasn't locking up so much of their code and had a such a chokehold of the desktop market, would there be as much of an incentive to actually innovate and create new products? If there were tons of browsers available, would people rally around Firefox as much, for example?
By on Mar. 31, 2008
Ballmer? This is like putting Saddam on the Time's list of 'Man of the Year'. He may be the bad-guy for the movement, but he has been spreading FUD into the movement trying to kill it for a decade now. First he dismissed it, then he tried to bury it, now he's trying to piss in the water. Please. PLEASE! There is talk that he was behind SCO's suckery. Being someone that the community has rallied against? Yes. Being a BUSINESS INFLUENCER? No way.
By on Apr. 01, 2008
Debian is one of the pure Linux distros out there. Run by the community, without any real 'premium version'. Perens should be on the list just for that.
By on Apr. 01, 2008
No body from Novell? RedHat? Ubuntu has Shuttleworth, but the only RedHat rep was from JBoss. No one from Debian? BitTorrent? Drupal? Vim? Wordpress? Too many to capture in 1 top 15 list.
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