Strange to see that the authors of the LLVM project, Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve are not present given that LLVM has been used by many large companies (Google, NVIDIA, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, ARM, AMD, etc) and projects like Rust, Julia and Swift.
GNU, GCC, are also free, libre and open-source software (FLOSS) which its very surprising to see the creator and founder Richard Stallman to be missing in this website.
Without him, Linus might have chosen to have kept Linux closed-source.
Why does nobody here understand that the faces included aren’t exhaustive? It’s obviously not all faces, and it doesn’t even claim to be just the top faces - it’s ‘notable and unsung’. More practically, it’s probably who made themselves available to be photographed and who would he photographer could get in touch with.
It's an easy thing to get wound up about, and something like this can't help but wander into a whole host of different brushfires that are smoldering or raging at the moment. I'm amazed that this thread hasn't gone more off the rails about diversity in tech or Stallman than it already has.
> It’s obviously not all faces, and it doesn’t even claim to be just the top faces - it’s ‘notable and unsung’.
It's a documentation of the people behind the development and advancement of the open source revolution. Sure, that doesn't claim that nobody else plays a role, but it has a hint of that.
> More practically, it’s probably who made themselves available to be photographed and who would he photographer could get in touch with.
Sounds plausible, yeah. The wording makes it sound like more though, but that's probably marketing, because "portraits of some people in the open source movement that I know/was able to meet" sounds less impressive and authoritative than Faces Of Open Source.
And another thing I see is that the people there is nearly only persons from America, there are a few european there like Thorvalds and Van Rossum, but other than that it is very american. Though that may just be who the photographer can get. A example of peoiple I at least would like to see to diversify the nationality a bit could be someone like Poul-Henning Kamp.
A very underrated person I'd love to see on there is Roberto Ierusalimschy, from Brazil, who created the Lua programming language, which runs under the hood in more places than one would expect.
Seems to be a one person project by a guy living in the US, so you'll only see pictures of people that have visited some conference in the USA the last 10 years or so.
Nothing I've read on the site suggests that it intends to be exhaustive. You could interpret this paragraph in several ways:
> Faces of Open Source is an on-going photographic documentation of the people behind the open source revolution. The project is comprised of portraits of notable and unsung heroes who dedicate themselves to the creation and advancement of our open source technologies.
"Without him, Linus might have chosen to have kept Linux closed-source"
[citation needed]
Linux 0.01 was released under a custom license, and IIRC the switch to GPL was under 0.12. The original inspiration was - if there was any beyond "I have a 386, I must write a kernel" - Minix, not GNU. Which was designated a learning OS. And comp.os.minix was where Linus first talked about Linux publicly.
The idea that "without Stallman, he might have kept it closed-source" is somewhat far fetched.
Without Stallman it probably would have chosen BSD style license and not GPL2. We can only speculate how likely or unlikely we would get the tivoization of Linux in that case.
I've been working on something parallel to this myself - interviews with open source maintainers to celebrate their work and aggregate advice for others[1]. It's great to see another example of open source work being highlighted.
Some of the images load a little slowly for me - the images in the modals could be compressed as I notice that the file is often significantly larger than the size it is displayed at on the page.
Reminiscent of Avedon's "In the American West". Those were shot on 11x14 large-format film, and the detail on the slightly larger than life print has to be seen up close and personal to be believed.
I recognized quite a few, since I met several of them at the old Usenix conferences I used to attend. Dennis Ritchie, Eric Allman, Kirk McCusick, Keith Bostic. A few others. I would like to have seen the late Evi Nemeth, but she was known more for System Administration than for open source, I suppose. I also recognized Guido van Rossum and Keith Packard, again from conferences. You really get to match a name to a face at events like that.
That so many people are asking "where is Stallman" on a site called Faces of Open Source makes be wonder how many of RMS' fans actually really listen to him. He loathes the term Open Source and sees it as direct attack on him and his Free Software movement[1].
Reading their about page [1], I'm not convinced they're making a conscious decision to call it open source instead of free software. I don't think the general public (which this is aimed at, it seems) differentiates the two either.
It's not the site's issue, it's Stallman. Even if they didn't intend for it to be a strict Open Source site, it has Open Source in the name which Stallman wouldn't participate in. The same way Stallman won't participate in (at least at the time of writing this comment) shows or conferences that only use Linux in the name and not GNU/Linux. For example he won't go to something like Ohio LinuxFest and the Linux Action Show had to rename itself the GNU/Linux Action Show to get him to come on. For some people the work of changing the name is worth it, for others it's not worth the hassle.
> Yet much of this software is “open source” — a technology commons that can be freely used and contributed to by anyone, but at the same time, is controlled by no one person or corporation.
That's pretty much the definition of free software; so yeah... Weird choices.
Doesn’t really matter if he hates it, they are not mutually exclusive, and the free software movement and the gnu project have contributed greatly to open source software in general.
It does matter because he would have to agree to participate and to sit down with the person who runs the site, Peter Adams, and let Peter take his picture(s).
Faces of Open Source is ran by a photographer named Peter Adams. Peter coordinates with the subject of his photos (for example Linus Torvalds) and asks if they want to be a part of his photo project. Since Linus Torvalds doesn't mind the term Open Source he is happy to participate in this project. Since Richard Stallman does not like the term Open Source he would or has more than likely declined to be a part of this project.
Readit News
"That Weird Al-looking dude is Larry Wall, right?"
It was.
"Who's this guy? He looks like the Architect from The Matrix."
It was Vint Cerf. He is the Architect of the Matrix.
GNU, GCC, are also free, libre and open-source software (FLOSS) which its very surprising to see the creator and founder Richard Stallman to be missing in this website.
Without him, Linus might have chosen to have kept Linux closed-source.
It's a documentation of the people behind the development and advancement of the open source revolution. Sure, that doesn't claim that nobody else plays a role, but it has a hint of that.
> More practically, it’s probably who made themselves available to be photographed and who would he photographer could get in touch with.
Sounds plausible, yeah. The wording makes it sound like more though, but that's probably marketing, because "portraits of some people in the open source movement that I know/was able to meet" sounds less impressive and authoritative than Faces Of Open Source.
> Faces of Open Source is an on-going photographic documentation of the people behind the open source revolution. The project is comprised of portraits of notable and unsung heroes who dedicate themselves to the creation and advancement of our open source technologies.
[citation needed]
Linux 0.01 was released under a custom license, and IIRC the switch to GPL was under 0.12. The original inspiration was - if there was any beyond "I have a 386, I must write a kernel" - Minix, not GNU. Which was designated a learning OS. And comp.os.minix was where Linus first talked about Linux publicly.
The idea that "without Stallman, he might have kept it closed-source" is somewhat far fetched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
It's the extent of the photographer's personal network, not a broad selection of people important to open source software.
I've been working on something parallel to this myself - interviews with open source maintainers to celebrate their work and aggregate advice for others[1]. It's great to see another example of open source work being highlighted.
Some of the images load a little slowly for me - the images in the modals could be compressed as I notice that the file is often significantly larger than the size it is displayed at on the page.
[1] - https://sourcesort.com
Personally, only Limor Fried. It's weird, but also interesting, that tech is so faceless.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
[1] http://www.facesofopensource.com/about/
That's pretty much the definition of free software; so yeah... Weird choices.
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