October 27, 2009
Most Influential People In Open Source
Mark Fidelman @ 1:04 am
As part of MindTouch’s 2009 open source best practices research, we asked C and VP level Open Source Executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. Over 50 votes from Executives in Europe and North America were cast to determine the 2009 edition (note: they could not vote for anyone in their own company). What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.
There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. For instance, Steve Ballmer was voted in because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was voted in because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government (in fact the Whitehouse.gov site was revamped with open source software). Notably absent however are any influential women.
This list of the top influential Executives of the 2009 is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Not all are recognizable, but these leaders are the movers, shakers and thought leaders of the open source industry. Want to know the future direction of open source? Just ask a few of the people on this list.
|
Rank |
Executive |
Biography |
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1 |
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Larry Augustin is CEO of SugarCRM. One of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he served as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and led the company through an IPO in 1999. |
|
2 |
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Matt Asay has been involved with open source since 1998, and is one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists. Asay currently manages sales and business development activities in the Americas for Alfresco. Asay also writes a very influential open source blog on CNET. |
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3 |
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Mårten Gustaf Mickos was chief executive officer (CEO) of MySQL AB. He served as chief executive officer from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun bought MySQL AB. He served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems until February 2009. In February 2008 he was announced as member of the board of Mozilla Messaging, in May 2009, he also joined the board of directors at RightScale. In September 2009 venture capital firm Benchmark Capital hired Mickos as their Entrepreneur In Residence. |
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4 |
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Jim Whitehurst was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in December 2007. Whitehurst joined Delta Air Lines in 2002, serving in various roles, most recently as Chief Operating Officer, responsible for Operations, Sales and Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. Prior to joining Delta, Whitehurst served as Vice President and Director of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and held various leadership roles in their Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Atlanta offices. |
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5 |
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Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date. |
![clip_image002[4]](http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/clip-image0024.jpg)
![clip_image002[6]](http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/clip-image0026.jpg)
![clip_image002[8]](http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/clip-image0028.jpg)
![clip_image002[10]](http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/clip-image00210.jpg)
Honorable Mentions
|
Individual |
Their Company |
Individual |
Their Company |
| Mark Radcliffe | DLA Piper | Mark Shuttleworth | Ubuntu Project |
| Andrew Aitken | Olliance Group | Rod Johnson | SpringSource |
| Marc Fleury | Retired (JBoss) | Scott Mcnealy | Sun Microsystems |
Mentions
Tom Erickson, Sam Ramji, Brian Gentile, Steve Ballmer, Doug Levin, Greg Schott, John Powell, John Roberts, Jonathan Schwartz, Roger Burkhardt, Tim Yeaton, Vivek Kundra, Walt Johnson, Zack Urlocker, Aaron Fulkerson, John Lilly
The accomplishments and influence of these executives highlight the story of the most significant changes in open source this year. We will continue to publish this “insiders” VIP list each year as part of our comprehensive analysis of open source best practices in sales and marketing.
Please comment on the list or let us know who is missing.
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October 27th, 2009 at 1:25 am
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by MindTouch: New blog post: Most Influential People In Open Source http://bit.ly/kwY8u...
October 27th, 2009 at 3:00 am
[...] http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2009/10/27/most-influential-people-in-open-source/ a few seconds ago from seesmic [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 5:09 am
[...] case you missed it, MindTouch has put up their list of Most Influential People In Open Source | MindTouch, Inc Blog. While the people listed are all deserving, I can’t help but notice that there is only one [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 7:14 am
The Mark Shuttleworth’s Twitter profile you linked to isn’t the right one…
October 27th, 2009 at 7:16 am
How is Matt Mullenweg not even mentioned?
October 27th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Ryan,
This year the participating executives were almost entirely from enterprise open source companies. Executives from about 25 open source companies were surveyed, some of those included: JasperSoft, Alfresco, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Talend, OpenBravo, etc… While I was impressed by the number of participants and participating companies I suspect next year there will be an even larger group participating.
Truth be told though, this list is not dissimilar from one I would have created were I tasked with listing the most influential. By the way, I really liked the fact Mark disallowed each vendor from nominating people from their own companies. This objectivity seems to have made the list pretty accurate.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:43 am
@Nathan, Thanks for the heads up. I removed the a href. Does he have a Twitter account?
October 27th, 2009 at 7:55 am
What about Shaun Walker, creator of DotNetNuke?
October 27th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net
October 27th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Are you crazy??? Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO)?
Seriously, I was expecting to see at least on of those individuals in the list:
Linus Torvalds (Linux creator), Eric S. Raymond (Open Source advocate), Bruce Perens (started Debian Linux and coined the term “Open Source”), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation spiritual father), Bob Young & Marc Ewing (Red Hat founders) and Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders).
October 27th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hi Aaron, Mark!
I’ve got to disagree with the validity of this list.
You write:
“What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.”
I would argue that because the industry insiders were judges, this list is not valid at all…frankly some of the people on this list have zero influence in the open source community at all.
Also, where is Tim O’Reilly on this list? Seems very strange for such a proponent of open source to be missing…
I don’t have anything at all against any of the people on the list above. I just think that as far as “influential people in open source” goes…there’s a lot of folks like Tim O’Reilly, Rasmus Lerdorf, Larry Wall, Guido Van Rossum, Tim Bray, etc, that open source community *activists* and *developers* listen to a lot more than Larry Augustin or Scott McNealy.
Cheers!
Jay
October 27th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
[...] recently named the Most Influential People in Open Source in their blog http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2009/10/27/most-influential-people-in-open-source/. I think that it is a measure of the health of the industry that it is difficult to identify those [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
[...] Most Influential People In Open Source [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
[...] MindTouch | [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
What about Matt Mullenweg?
Have you ever heard about a publishing platform called “WordPress”? ; )
October 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
@Jay,
I like what Radcliffe wrote: http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=296 In short, we should separate into two categories next year: 1. contributions in business or law and 2. technical contributions.
As for “industry insiders” I can report the top three people (and several others) on this list each have had a significant, direct and positive impact on MindTouch. I suspect the same is true for the other 25 open source companies surveyed. Realize these 25 open source companies represent the most successful and innovative open source companies today. I think this speaks volumes.
Finally, I think your suggestions, and some others listed here, are solid. However, I completely agree with Matt’s assessment in his post on this list: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10383730-16.html I think this is a pretty clear indication of the maturation of our industry.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:22 am
[...] Apkopoti aptaujas rezultāti, kuras mērķis bija noskaidrot ietekmīgākos opensource industrijas pārstāvjus. Aptaujājot 50 vadošo Ziemeļamerikas un Eiropas opensource kompāniju vadītājus, noskaidroti 5 līderi: [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 1:38 am
[...] folks at open source collaboration platform MindTouch conducted a poll recently to get a sense of who open source executives think are the most influential people in the [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Open source is not equivalent to open source companies. Please don’t abuse the name of “open source” to try and refer to what are effectively modern-day-shareware businesses.
You should really have said “Most Influential People in Commercial Open Source Businesses”.
Open source is also not an industry.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:54 am
[...] Most Influential People In Open Source | MindTouch, Inc Blog [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 8:55 am
How about Michael Tiemann ?
October 28th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Where is Linus Torvalds??
October 28th, 2009 at 10:09 am
[...] Most Influential People In Open Source | MindTouch, Inc Blog [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 10:11 am
[...] Most Influential People In Open Source | MindTouch, Inc Blog [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
No Mitchell Baker? One of the most significant women in opensource.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
@Imran,
I too am disappointed by the lack of women in this list. Next year perhaps.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Ditto on Mullenweg. WordPress is bringing open source to tons of people.
October 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Honestly, who gives a RAt’s ass?
October 29th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I also agree with Miiko above. The survey seems rather sketchy and it feels like you are mixing apples and oranges and peanuts. The result is an interesting popularity contest, but that is probably about it. I would try creating a few different categories (legal track, business track, tech track, purist track) - that would be interesting.
October 31st, 2009 at 1:34 am
Disappointing list. Real heroes are completely left out. Instead the rich and famous are included. Remember Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tredgell, Larry Wall, Alan Cox, Richard Stallman who started the free software movement..
October 31st, 2009 at 10:26 am
This list includes none of the real heroes, instead only the rich and famous.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Anand, I agree with your heroes ‘hall of fame’ list. The goal of the survey was to determine who are the movers and shakers in open source today.
BTW: Next year’s survey will be expanded to include some new categories.
November 1st, 2009 at 8:06 am
The title of the article is wrong. This clearly are (some) of the most influential executives as you state later in the article, not the most important _people_ in open source. Important people in open source are usually not executives.
November 1st, 2009 at 8:30 am
Want to know the future direction of open source? Just ask a few of the people on this list.
That statement sounds good but is quite hollow. One of the great things with Open source is that you never know whats coming next…
November 1st, 2009 at 9:03 am
Wow, quite surprised that Andrew Trigwell of SAMBA fame isn’t there.
November 1st, 2009 at 10:19 am
Since Steve Ballmer is in there, then your probably considering influential for better of for worst.
November 1st, 2009 at 10:48 am
@Ra, I completely agree.
November 1st, 2009 at 10:52 am
Obviously this list is a bit biased, two of the names on this list already board member for MindTouch, more or less this is a marketing ploy.
November 1st, 2009 at 11:02 am
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November 1st, 2009 at 11:08 am
alan cox.
without him few things would work.
never mind the suits
November 1st, 2009 at 11:20 am
Where is Ton Roosendaal from the Blender Foundation!
His look on Open Source and Open Contend changed everything for good!
Blender is now a well used alternative in the industry.
Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny are the only open movies right now, and used a lot for studies.
Yo Frankie!, is one of the only open games that is used as base for a lot of starting developers.
Where is Ton, the best open source CEO ever!
November 1st, 2009 at 11:21 am
Missing: OpenERP
Featured in bloomberg news a few days ago:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=a0Wy0DITQBiA
November 1st, 2009 at 11:36 am
I’m deeply shocked and agree wholeheartedly with Etienne who mentiones the real Open Source heroes and movers like Linus Torvalds (Linux creator), Eric S. Raymond (Open Source advocate), Bruce Perens (started Debian Linux and coined the term “Open Source”), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation spiritual father), Bob Young & Marc Ewing (Red Hat founders) and Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders).
Shame on you for not mentioning ANY of those above. I’ve been using Open Source software since early ‘90 and can’t say I’m impressed with your list.
….and remove Steve Ballmer from the list before I regurgitate….
November 1st, 2009 at 11:55 am
Miguel de Icaza?
Pamela Jones?
Paul Graham?
+1 to Michael Tiemann and Alan Cox.
Jamie Zawinski?
Larry and Sergey ?
Matthias Etrich?
Mozilla folks changed the whole internet game on its head and continue to do so.
Conclusion: “few of the most influential people”
Corollary:
VPs and CEOs need to be more knowledgeable while using their vote.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
This list looks equal to saying that “The makers of Linux, GNU, Apache, Python, QT etc. are really all open source cheerleaders, and we can make money without them.”
November 1st, 2009 at 1:02 pm
[...] http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2009/10/27/most-influential-people-in-open-source/ a few seconds ago from xmpp [...]
November 1st, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I have __NEVER__ seen such a dumb list, where is Linus, the Well crowd, ESR, Perens … All this tells me is the author is utterly clueless!
November 1st, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Dries? If by “influential” you mean “responsible for creating one of the most poorly planned and sloppiest content management systems to date”, then yes I would agree.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Sir,
I think your list is foobar, so many omission its laughable.
And Ballmer? Most obnoxious surely, ugliest probably, sickest fux you wouldn’t want to have to sit through lunch with, maybe. But open source?
Or did you mean open sores?
xx00
shooby
November 1st, 2009 at 2:14 pm
@Dan,
I must point out that Matt and Larry are very active on the board of many open source companies. The two combined likely sit on the majority of open source companies’ boards or advisory boards. Indeed, this is likely one of the factors they’re considered to be very influential.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I was happy to see Dries Buytaert in the right place.
Drupal is amazing, changes the web, and lots of its success is thanks to Dries.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Why are 2 of your board members in the top 2 most influential? Is it because you can arbitrarily chose who ever you want to be in this list.
Also the list is incredibly web centric and to a person who actually uses FOSS it is so obvious that you don’t use a FOSS desktop, everything listed is so webcentric it is painful.
November 1st, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Are you crazy??? Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO)?
Seriously, I was expecting to see at least on of those individuals in the list:
Linus Torvalds (Linux creator), Eric S. Raymond (Open Source advocate), Bruce Perens (started Debian Linux and coined the term “Open Source”), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation spiritual father), Bob Young & Marc Ewing (Red Hat founders) and Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders).
QFT
November 1st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Maybe not up to the same caliber as the rest of the list, but I’d definitely put a mention up for Pete Trbovich. He runs http://penguinpetes.com/ A lot of what he says is really controversial. So what he says ends up being what everybody else is saying five years later.
He also has a parody of Linux culture in a comic strip there, “Doomed to Obcurity”, which is just plain wicked.
November 1st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I would say this is more a list of those who have been successful with commercialization of open source. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The true influential people in open source are the creatives who founded the movement and are still active today. At the top of the list should be somebody like Linus Torvalds or Mark Shuttleworth.
November 1st, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Executives who vote for other executives? The title of this post is incorrect.
As Jay Pipes said, open source community activists and developers don’t care about the people on this list. Let me do my own survey…
November 1st, 2009 at 5:25 pm
[...] reading “Most Influential People In Open Source” and completely disagree, I decided to conduct my own [...]
November 1st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
This is a list of C levels, not people who are actually in the industry! The people surveyed are only busy with selling their widget and could care less about open-source or even know what it is. These people aren’t influential at all, they’re just the ‘currently employed’ by the boards of each company. Influential are people who see open-source as a movement, Stallman, Torvalds and the like.
November 1st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
What with all the SHOCK and HORROR over Ballmer being mentioned I feel compelled to mention that I believe this: http://bit.ly/2MlHMx was the root of the Ballmer vote(s).
November 1st, 2009 at 6:08 pm
If you really care, please go vote yourself: http://annafilina.com/blog/most-influential-people-in-os/
November 1st, 2009 at 9:34 pm
A title reading “Most Influential People In Open Source” should be supported by a proper methodology. Most of the folks listed certainly play a role in open source influence, but the main players are not even mentioned and I don’t see anyone from the EFF either…and if this is only focused on business types at least get Mark Shuttleworth - his foundation only made the most popular linux disto for personal use.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Drupal rocks
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 am
If MySQL guys are so high up there, there should have been a mention of some of the Postgres proponents too…
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:28 am
[...] Ballmer），原因是他从最初对开源的排斥到现在对开源的正面影响。行业内部人士的投票结果为： 1、SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin，1993年他创建了VA [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:17 am
Congratulations to Drupal Dries!
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:33 am
What exactly Mr. Steve is doing here?
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:49 am
Whereas it’s arguable whether RMS, ESR, Linus and Alan Cox still have a significant, direct influence on open source software, it’s simply wrong putting Mike Shuttleworth just as a “honorable mention” (by the way, you can link to his site markshuttleworth.com). His Canonical currently has an enormous influence on desktop linux community. Also, how about key developers of “hottest” projects, like KDE (Aaron Seigo seems like a very influential person within that community), Mono (Miguel de Icaza?) or GNOME (Stormy Peters?). You should also put Novell as an influential company.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:09 am
[...] Ballmer），原因是他从最初对开源的排斥到现在对开源的正面影响。行业内部人士的投票结果为： 1、SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin，1993年他创建了VA [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 am
Weird list… What about Linus and Alan?!?
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:12 am
This isn’t the list of the most influential people in open source, this is the list of business men that a different bunch of business men have actually heard of. In open source software I would expect to see Torsvalds, Cox and Stallman at least. And where are the women?
Pointless!
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:23 am
Where is Mullah Stallman and his taliban ?
Please do make it a point to mention Mullah Stallman or else he will be bring out a new license version expressly to avoid these kind of omissions called the GNU Do leave me Please license.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:26 am
Cool list. But I know only a few of the ones listed.
Why is Mark Shuttleworth’s name not linked to his blog - http://www.markshuttleworth.com/ when everybody’s names are linked to their respective websites ?
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 am
@Etienne Savard:
“Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google founders)”
What’s OPEN in Google? Goole is a black hole for open source.. open source may enter, but it never get out. I can’t see what’s the influence of Google in open source.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:07 am
@LinuxAndFriends,
Thanks. Shuttleworth was originally linked to the wrong Shuttleworth. Corrected.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
HUB DG Cloud Computing…
11/2/2009: Most Influential People in Open Source…
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:18 pm
[...] Fidelman kindly created a Twitter list of the members of the 2009 influential open source executives and offers it up for one-click consumption. Enjoy! Categories: MindTouch | [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 10:00 am
[...] Umfrage: Die einflussreichsten Open-Source-AkteureDer US-amerikanische Open-Source-Spezialist Mindtouch hat 50 Manager von Open-Source-Unternehmen aus den USA und Europa um ihr Votum gebeten: Wer ist der Einflussreichste von ihnen, wollte die Umfrage “The most Influentual Open Source People” wissen.silicon.de, mindtouch.com [...]
November 10th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Steve Ballmer? Open source? Really?
Granted, guess he serves as an influence on what NOT to do.
November 11th, 2009 at 4:32 am
What about Moodle? There’s no mention of Martin Dougiamus and his Moodle team in the list. This seems a little short sighted based on the massive positive impact Moodle and other VLEs are having on the education sector worldwide.
November 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am
@disem:
> What’s OPEN in Google? Goo[g]le is a black hole for open source.. open source may enter, but it never get out. I can’t see what’s the influence of Google in open source.
That’s total FUD!
You apparently don’t know what you are talking about… Google are good Open Source citizens and they have opened-up a lot of cool projects. Here is a short and incomplete list:
- The Go programming language: http://golang.org/
- Google Code (kind of SourceForge and free as in free beer)
- Closure: http://code.google.com/intl/en/closure/
- Android: http://code.google.com/p/android/
- And, not the least, they provide a lot of API to interact with their web services: http://code.google.com/intl/en/labs/
They also finance students working on Open Source projects with Google Summer of Code: http://code.google.com/intl/en/soc/
Microsoft, on the opposite, use Open Source components in Windows 7 without providing the source code back: http://www.withinwindows.com/2009/11/06/microsoft-lifts-gpl-code-uses-in-microsoft-store-tool/ Unless someone catch them!
November 16th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
disem Says:
>> What’s OPEN in Google? Google is a black hole for open source..
>> open source may enter, but it never get out. I can’t see what’s the influence of Google in open source.
You obviously don’t know what you are talking about. Man, you got a lot of FUD in only 3 short sentences!
Let me put the fact straight about Google. Google is not an Open Source Company but they definitely are good Open Source citizen. They have open sourced a lot of code and they support financially Summer of Code which sponsors students to work on Open Source projects during summer. They also provides Google Code which is hosting thousands of Open Source projects (including Google’s). They recently released, as open source projects, the Go programming language and Closure. Their web browser Chrome is Open Source. They provide a lot of API’s (in many languages) to interact with their web services. Android is Open Source.
What do you want else? Their search engine technology? Come on!
November 16th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Oups, double-post!
Sorry. Same ideas, different words.
November 17th, 2009 at 8:07 am
[...] some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number [...]
November 17th, 2009 at 11:06 am
[...] thing to have a proven business leader at the helm of your ship. It is another thing to have the most influential man in open source heading up your commercial open source [...]
November 19th, 2009 at 3:25 am
[...] US-amerikanische Open-Source-Spezialist Mindtouch hat 50 Manager von Open-Source-Unternehmen aus den USA und Europa um ihr Votum gebeten. Dabei [...]
November 19th, 2009 at 6:29 am
[...] itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, [...]
November 20th, 2009 at 11:24 am
What about Ton Roosendaal, who runs Blender, one of the most solid and routinely successful open-source projects in a world where most of them die due to lack of support?
http://www.blender.org