Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Michael StonebrakerMichael StonebrakerBorn 11 Oct 1943From 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…0i
  2. 2Michael TiemannMichael TiemannSupport contracts for free tools. Tiemann co-founded Cygnus Support in 1989 with John Gilmore and David Henkel-Wallace, the first company built purely around selling services for free software. Customers paid Cygnus to port, fix and support the GNU compiler and debugger for their chips, while…0i
  3. 3Marc EwingMarc EwingPackaging Linux. Ewing, a programmer, put together his own Linux distribution in the early 1990s, named after the red cap he wore at university, and in 1995 merged his work with Bob Young's distribution business to form Red Hat. Its package manager, RPM, made installing and updating software on…0
  4. 4Bob Young (businessman)Bob Young (businessman)Selling a brand on free code. Young, a Canadian who sold Linux CDs and books by mail, co-founded Red Hat with Marc Ewing and argued that a company could make money selling confidence, a trusted brand, testing and support, around software anyone could copy. Red Hat's 1999 share listing was one of…0i
  5. 5Brian BehlendorfBrian BehlendorfBorn 30 Mar 1973Governing shared projects. Behlendorf was a core member of the group that coordinated patches to the NCSA web server in 1995 and turned it into Apache, which became the most widely used web server, and he helped create the Apache Software Foundation to own the project neutrally. He then co-founded…0i
  6. 6Larry AugustinLarry AugustinBorn 10 Oct 1962Hardware and hosting for open source. Augustin co-founded VA Research in 1993 to sell computers preloaded with Linux, and attended the 1998 meeting where the term open source was chosen. As VA Linux, the company listed in 1999 with a record first-day share price rise, then collapsed in the dot-com…0i
  7. 7Mårten MickosMårten MickosBorn 6 Nov 1962Dual licensing. Mickos, a Finnish executive, ran MySQL AB from 2001 to its sale to Sun Microsystems in 2008, growing it on a dual-licence model: the database was free under the GPL for anyone who shared their own code, while companies embedding it in closed products bought a commercial licence. The…0i
  8. 8Mark ShuttleworthMark ShuttleworthBorn 18 Sept 1973A free desktop funded by its founder. Shuttleworth, who made his fortune selling the security firm Thawte, founded Canonical in 2004 to produce Ubuntu, a Linux distribution built on Debian's volunteer work with regular releases and a promise to stay free of charge. Canonical earns money from…0i
  9. 9Mitchell BakerMitchell BakerA non-profit with a commercial arm. Baker, a lawyer who wrote the Mozilla Public Licence at Netscape, helped set up the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and its taxable subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which shipped Firefox. Most of its income came from deals making a search engine the browser's…0i
  10. 10Matt MullenwegMatt MullenwegBorn 11 Jan 1984Hosting the open project. Mullenweg co-created WordPress in 2003 and founded Automattic in 2005, which runs WordPress.com, a hosted version, and sells add-ons, while the open-source software stays free for anyone to install. The arrangement relies on thousands of volunteer contributors and on…0i