Michael Stonebraker

From university code to companies. Stonebraker led the Ingres and then Postgres database projects at Berkeley, releasing their code under permissive licences, and repeatedly founded companies to commercialise the research, starting with Relational Technology in 1980. Postgres later grew, through volunteers who added SQL support, into the community-run PostgreSQL. His career shows the academic route from open research code to commercial products. He won the Turing Award in 2014.