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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.

5 comments

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.

But it seems obvious that it can't be exhaustive. It's clearly a photo shoot. And it's on-going (you can subscribe to it).

I'd rather people learn to think critically instead of getting worked up that every exception wasn't enumerated in the tagline.

I don't believe that has anything to do with critical thinking. It's likely just marketing by the creators and they don't mean to claim to judge the value of contributions, but they are declaring that these are the faces behind the open source revolution. Wording matters.

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.

It’s super strange cause I contributed a typo fix to the python doc and have yet to get a phone call.

"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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

All I know is what I heard in linus’ debconf talk, but that’s enough to know you’re just guessing.

Guessing it's the same reason they have Eric Schmidt but no ESR, and staff from HRC's presidential campaign.

It's the extent of the photographer's personal network, not a broad selection of people important to open source software.

Odd, ESR was there when I looked.

Mea culpa, I didn't recognize Eric because his face is so small in the picture, really hard to identify (had to scroll and scan a few times to find him on my desktop).