April 20, 2019 at 11:03

Who is who in open source: geek biographies

    Let's talk about those who played an important role in the establishment of the open-source community.


    / photo Hitesh Choudhary

    Ian Murdoch


    Ian Murdoch was born in 1972 in a small town on the border between West Germany and Switzerland. There, his father, an American etymologist, was engaged in scientific research. In 1975, Murdoch Sr. became a professor at Purdue University. For this reason, the boy’s family returned to the United States, where Ian grew up.

    Ian met computers at the age of nine when his father brought home a university Apple II. Murdoch was delighted with the device, and when the computer was taken back, he began to visit his father’s laboratory. Often the cars were busy - instead of playing games, the boy had to watch his father's students write the code.

    So, in Ian, interest in programming arose. He himself began to write programs in Applesoft Basic and assembler. Noticing the son’s talent, the father bought the same computer home, but, as happens with children, Ian quickly lost interest in this occupation. The rest of Apple II’s childhood was gathering dust in a closet.

    In his student years, Ian's interest woke up again. After listening to an introductory course of lectures on COBOL, he began to actively engage in programming and fell in love with Unix, and then Linux. But the assemblies popular at that time, according to Ian, were too expensive and poorly maintained. Therefore Murdoch decided to develop his distribution.

    So, in August 1993, Debian was born. Ian named the product after his wife (DEBOR) and himself (IAN). Murdoch's goal was to create a system around which a large community would gather. And so it happened, Debian to this day remains one of the most popular distributions.


    / photo Ilya Schurov CC BY-SA

    Debian brought fame to Yen, and he began working with various open source funds and IT companies. From 2007 to 2011, Ian led the development of OpenSolaris, an open source distribution based on the Sun Microsystems proprietary Unix platform. From 2011 to 2015, he was vice president of Salesforce, after which he moved to the still young company Docker.

    In the same year, after a series of incidents with police and arrest, unfortunatelyIan committed suicide by leaving three children, grieving relatives, and an orphaned Debian community.

    Eric Raymond


    Eric Stephen Raymond - a programmer and one of the main theorists of the open source movement - was born in 1957 in Boston. Eric's childhood passed in Venezuela, where his father programmed UNIVAC mainframes. Cerebral palsy, which the boy suffered from birth, prevented him from engaging in physical activity. Therefore, Eric decided to improve in another direction. He followed in his father's footsteps and became interested in writing programs.

    In the 70s, when the family returned to the United States, Eric entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he became interested in software modifications and the concept of open source. He carried his passion through the years until the moment when in 1996 he became the maintainer of the open mail client fetchmail. Then he decided to devote himself to the popularization of free software. The experience gained by Eric during the development of fetchmail, served as the basis for the famous book "Cathedral and Bazaar", in which he talked about the collective work on open software.


    / photo jerone2 CC BY-SA

    "Cathedral and Bazaar" has become a defining work in the theory of open source development. In the book, Eric argues for open Internet collaboration between programmers. According to him, the more people have access to the code, the faster bugs are detected and fixed. Therefore, transparent work in front of everyone (Bazar) is better than working out in a "closed club" ("Cathedral").

    Thus, Eric became one of the main voices of the open source community. In 1998, he founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. He still works there.

    Blake Ross


    Blake Aaron Ross was born in 1985 in the family of a psychotherapist and lawyer. The child’s craving for the computer was encouraged: the boy grew up playing quests with his father. By the age of ten, he owned HTML and created websites, and as a teenager began to develop simple video games.

    / photo by John Griffiths CC BY-SA
    Back in school, Blake began working on the Netscape Navigator browser - at that moment his code had just become open. The work of the boy was noted by the developers of the browser and took him to an unpaid position. But Netscape was slowly dying and losing users every day. The company tried its best to support the browser, so it launched Mozilla Suite - a rethought version of Netscape. According to Blake, the product was full of unnecessary functions, and its main task - displaying pages - did slowly and poorly.

    In 2002, having teamed up with old-timer Dave Hyatt, he assembled a group of like-minded people and began work on a new - fast and simple - browser.

    Two years later, when Blake was a 19-year-old student at Stanford, the resulting browser was released under the name Firefox. In less than a year, the product was downloaded over 100 million times. And today, the Fire Fox remains one of the most popular browsers.

    Ross now holds an executive position at Uber. Despite fame, and perhaps because of it, he rarely appears in public and does not share the details of his personal life with the press.

    Larry wall


    Larry Wall was born in 1954 in a family of hereditary Protestant pastors who lived in a working suburb of Los Angeles. He started programming at school, when he had a specialized calculator. After school, being a deeply religious person, Larry entered Seattle Pacific University, founded with the participation of the church.

    He spent eight years in Seattle, three of which he devoted to working at a local computer lab. During this time, Larry changed his specialty three times, until he settled on linguistics. At the same university, Larry met his future wife, Gloria, and already with her entered the magistracy in California.

    After graduating, Wall went to work as a programmer at NASA. There he began his professional career in the IT world. In 1987, Larry began working on a new programming language. The syntax of the language was influenced by his linguistic education and, in his own words, the culture in which he grew up. Initially, Larry wanted to name the creation “Gloria” in honor of his wife, but for some reason changed his mind and opted for Perl - as a “pearl”, but without a vowel “a”.


    / photo Klapi CC BY-SA

    By the mid-90s, Perl had become the de facto standard for creating scripts on * nix systems. Larry independently wrote a language textbook and other books published by O'Reilly in the late 90s and early 00s. Today, Larry continues to occupy the post of the “magnanimous life dictator” of the Perl community and is actively involved in the development of the project.


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