Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. They are often obtained from the website of each distribution, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to servers and powerful supercomputers.
Timothy O'Reilly is an Irish-American author and publisher, who is the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Jonathan Edward James Bacon is a writer and software engineer, originally from the United Kingdom, but now based in California. He works as a consultant on community strategy.
Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.
Russell Nelson is an American computer programmer. He was a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative and briefly served as its president in 2005.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term for free software and open-source software. FOSS is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and the source code is hidden from the users.
David "Doc" Searls, is an American journalist, columnist, and a widely read blogger. He is the host of FLOSS Weekly, a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network, a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, Editor-in-Chief of Linux Journal, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an alumnus fellow (2006–2010) of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and co-host of the Reality 2.0 Podcast.
Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of open source software.
Harald Welte, also known as LaForge, is a German programmer.
Larry Augustin is a former VP at Amazon Web Services. He formerly was the chairman of the board of directors of SugarCRM. He is a former venture capitalist and the founder of VA Software. During the height of the dot-com bubble, Augustin was a billionaire on paper at the age of 38.
LugRadio was a British podcast on the topic of Linux and events in the free and open source software communities, as well as coverage of technology, digital rights and politics.
Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android has historically been developed by a consortium of developers known as the Open Handset Alliance, but its most widely used version is primarily developed by Google. It was unveiled in November 2007, with the first commercial Android device, the HTC Dream, being launched in September 2008.
Greg Stein, living in Austin, Texas, United States, is a programmer, speaker, sometime standards architect, and open-source software advocate, appearing frequently at conferences and in interviews on the topic of open-source software development and use.
ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux distribution developed and designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS, based on the Linux kernel, and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interface.
OPhone, or OMS, is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. It is based on technologies initially developed by Android Inc., a firm later purchased by Google, and work done by the Open Handset Alliance. The OPhone OS has appeared only on China Mobile phones, and the software was developed for China Mobile by software firm Borqs. A modified version of OMS has appeared on other carriers as Android+, also developed and maintained by Borqs. Android has been modified for local Chinese markets by China Mobile's OPhone Software Developers Network.
Waze Mobile Ltd, doing business as Waze, formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, it incorporates user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a cellular network. Waze describes its application as a community-driven initiative that is free to download and use.
Jay Ryan Freeman is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for creating the Cydia software application and related software for jailbroken iOS—a modified version of Apple's iOS that allows for the installation and customization of software outside of the regulation imposed by the App Store system.
The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) was a project of the Linux Foundation to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet and other major information systems. The project was announced on 24 April 2014 in the wake of Heartbleed, a critical security bug in OpenSSL that is used on millions of websites.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
