Friday 15 May 2009
Who are your tech heroes? ☀
Dave Winer wrote:
Here’s how to decide:
1. Someone who has made largely selfless contributions to open technology — i.e. tech that people can reuse without limits or fees. Examples would be BitTorrent or HTTP.
2. Someone who you think would “do the right thing” whatever that is, most of the time. That is, someone you trust.
3. Other criteria?
My short list:
- Tim Berners Lee - creator of the world wide web, could have sold out and become a king, but motivated solely by a vision of connecting computer users
- Richard Stallman - the original free software hippie, creator of the C compiler and Emacs editor, required tools needed before any hacker could create a free operating system
- Linus Torvalds - creator of Linux, the OS that powers much of the common folk internet experience today
- Vint Cerf - along with Bob Kahn, created the TCP/IP (communications protocol that enables the internet) protocol that is taken for granted (or derided as archaic), but was revolutionary at its inception, in defiance of corporate powers like IBM, MCI, AT&T that were more interested in thwarting open efforts in lieu of their own proprietary solutions
- Yukihiro Matsumoto - creator of the Ruby programming language
- Philip Greenspun - now a smug, snotty internet millionaire, but his “Guide to Web Publishing” (published 10+ years ago) was instrumental in my transformation from mainframe programmer to web developer
- Lawrence Lessig - a legal champion for F/OSS, and an activist for free and open in all digital realms, now his focus is on reducing government corruption
- Larry Wall - creator of Perl
- Rasmus Lerdorf - creator of PHP
- Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie - authors of the seminal “The C Programming Language” that 30+ years later, still serves as the ideal model of a programming language guide
- J.C.R. Licklider - psychologist, ARPA head, who envisioned modern computing and the World Wide Web way back in the 1960s
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