eWeek Names Top 15 Open Source Business Influencers
by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 31, 2008Comments (4)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?
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