The father of the free software movement, launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create an operating system composed solely from free software. Stallman also coined the concept copyleft, a play on the well known copy right, to modify and distribute free software. He is also the head author of  Free Software License which lays out the terms for the General Public License. Stallman is well known as somewhat of a crazy person; he used to literally live in the MIT AI Lab, to the extent that it was his legal address for his taxes and government forms. Nowadays, Stallman goes from talk to talk, mostly in the Americas, with a living style described as being like a graduate student. He’s written extensively on his blog, which is worth a look.

Stallman has had a series of interviews over the course of his long career, chronicled here

 

The Software Engineer  who was the lead force behind the internet’s most popular open source operating system, Linux kernel. Torvalds  He over saw the  Free Standards Group which then  became the Linux Foundation where he still continues to work. He initially intended Linux to be a very small project, primarily just to get a working version of GNU for his personal computer. Linus has something of a reputation for being caustic and impolite to people, especially around linux itself. He’s done it plenty of times, but you may want to take a look at his remarks directed at NVIDIA, and at the Linux community itself

Torvalds hasn’t been as active in terms of public relations compared to Stallman, but has done a number of interviews. He was interviewed by popular tech blog Techcrunch, and by Intel’s Open Source expert Dirk Hohndel (video), along with plenty of others

 

 

 

Eric S. Raymond

Computer programmer, author and a lead open source software advocate.  With his publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his essays on the Linux Kernel,  he became an  unofficial spokesman for the open source movement. He is a proponent of the belief that Open Source Software is superior to proprietary software, given the theory that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” essentially saying the more people can solve any technical problem. Raymond certainly has been responsible for the crystallization of a lot of the ideas around the Open Source Community, and it is worth looking into his achievements.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar can be found for free here, or purchased on Amazon here if you prefer a dead tree version.

 

 

 

 

 

A detailed list of everyone that was involved in the free software movement can be found here.