Free software was not born in 2017, and it was not born at Facebook. It was born with GNU (1983), the kernel a Finnish student released as a hobby (1991), and the definition from the Open Source Initiative (1998). What industry did afterward — Ubuntu, Azure, React, Open Compute — is the second half of the story: open source became infrastructure. This text updates the five names in the original post and restores the genealogy. The kernel timeline is in Linux turns 35; the UNIX timeline, in UNIX — the origin.
Who the 2017 list skipped
Before the five: Richard Stallman wrote GNU and the GPL — without that, Linux would be a kernel without a free userland. Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond named “open source” and OSI, translating the movement into corporate vocabulary. Debian (Ian Murdock, 1993) is Ubuntu’s trunk. Without them, Shuttleworth has no distribution and Torvalds has no system.
Linus Torvalds
The kernel began in 1991, with a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, announced on the MINIX list as a hobby that “would not be big and professional like GNU.” He wanted to call it Freax (free + freak + X). The FTP admin, Ari Lemmke, created the directory linux. The name stuck.
In 2026, the same man is still the final filter for git.kernel.org. Android, ChromeOS, the entire cloud, and much of local AI run on that kernel. In 2005, furious with BitKeeper, he wrote Git in days — the Git which is now the foundation of CI/CD. He also maintains Subsurface (diving software). A Linux Foundation Fellow; he owns the “Linux” trademark.
The line from 1991 remains the best summary of the project: a hobby. The rest of the industry can figure out how to keep up.
Mark Shuttleworth
South African, a Debian contributor, he sold Thawte to VeriSign, paid for his own trip to the ISS in 2002, and in 2004 founded Canonical to fund Ubuntu (“humanity toward others”). Ubuntu is Debian with a cadence, a desktop your relative installs, and a server the cloud rents.
In 2017, the text hyped OpenStack. In 2026, Ubuntu is still the most common distribution on public cloud instances; Canonical lives on Ubuntu Pro, Landscape, snaps, and support. 24.04 LTS and 26.04 are the current track. Shuttleworth remains the shareholder; the project follows Debian’s social contract with a company in the middle — Ubuntu’s eternal compromise.
Mark Zuckerberg
He is not a free software pioneer. He is the CEO who discovered that Facebook (now Meta) does not exist without Linux, PHP, MySQL, and an inexpensive data center. What he did that benefited the ecosystem: opened data center hardware through the Open Compute Project (2011) — server, rack, and power supply specifications the industry copied — and released React, GraphQL, PyTorch (through FAIR). HHVM fell by the wayside.
The 2017 line (“the world’s biggest open source software company without selling software”) was marketing. Meta publishes a lot of code; the product remains closed. OCP and PyTorch are the part that matters in real-world Linux.
Dave McAllister
A behind-the-scenes name, not a poster figure. He worked at Adobe (open fonts) and at Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards group, around Gluster and big data. Then he moved to Solace. The value of including him in 2017 was to show the professional who lives inside companies pushing open source while Torvalds and Stallman occupy the stage. He remains that type: a community engineer, not a kernel founder.
Bill Laing
At Microsoft, Laing was the face of the infrastructure shift: Azure, scale-out servers, joining Open Compute. The 2017 post recalled Ballmer’s 2001 line — “Linux is a cancer.” In 2014, Satya Nadella said “Microsoft loves Linux.” In 2016, the company joined the Linux Foundation. In 2018, it bought GitHub. Azure came to run more Linux than Windows. .NET became open source. WSL put the kernel on the Windows desktop.
Laing later left Microsoft. The shift was not one man’s doing — it was Nadella, Azure, and the calculation that cloud cannot be built with Windows alone. But the announcement of “opening the server design” cited in the original text was real, and Microsoft’s OCP is still there.
What changed since 2017
- The hobby kernel became AI’s OS: CUDA, TPU on GCP, Ollama on a laptop.
- Git is no longer “Linus’s SCM”: it is the protocol of DevOps.
- The GPL vs. “corporate open source” battle did not end — it just moved to another stage (SSPL, BSL, commons clause).
- Those missing from the list — Stallman, Perens, Debian — remain the foundation. The five names from 2017 are, to different degrees, what industry built on top of that foundation.
References
- Linux turns 35
- UNIX — the origin of systems
- The history of operating systems
- Git made simple and fast
- kernel.org · Open Source Initiative · GNU
- Open Compute Project
A pioneer in this craft is someone who releases code and accepts that the rest of the world will fork it. Torvalds did that at 21. The rest of the 2017 list, deep down, simply admitted there was no other foundation to build on.