{"id":163,"date":"2017-04-30T13:11:28","date_gmt":"2017-04-30T16:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2017\/04\/pioneiros-do-opensource\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T01:34:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T04:34:25","slug":"pioneiros-do-opensource","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2017\/04\/pioneiros-do-opensource\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source Pioneers."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mascote<\/p>\n

Note (2026):<\/strong> A list from April 2017, based on a corporate roundup from that time. It mixed an actual founder (Torvalds) with corporate adopters (Microsoft, Facebook). Nine years later, Linux is the foundation of cloud and AI; Microsoft sponsors the Linux Foundation; Facebook became Meta, and the Open Compute Project is still standing. The names from the original list remain \u2014 with the context that was missing, and with those the list skipped (Stallman, OSI, Debian).<\/div>\n

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<\/strong> (1998). What industry did afterward \u2014 Ubuntu, Azure, React, Open Compute \u2014 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<\/a>; the UNIX timeline, in UNIX \u2014 the origin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Who the 2017 list skipped<\/h2>\n

Before the five: Richard Stallman<\/strong> wrote GNU and the GPL \u2014 without that, Linux would be a kernel without a free userland. Bruce Perens<\/strong> and Eric S. Raymond<\/strong> named \u201copen source\u201d and OSI, translating the movement into corporate vocabulary. Debian<\/strong> (Ian Murdock, 1993) is Ubuntu\u2019s trunk. Without them, Shuttleworth has no distribution and Torvalds has no system.<\/p>\n

Linus Torvalds<\/h2>\n

\"Retrato<\/p>\n

The kernel began in 1991, with a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, announced on the MINIX list as a hobby that \u201cwould not be big and professional like GNU.\u201d He wanted to call it Freax<\/strong> (free + freak + X). The FTP admin, Ari Lemmke, created the directory linux<\/code>. The name stuck.<\/p>\n

In 2026, the same man is still the final filter for git.kernel.org<\/code>. Android, ChromeOS, the entire cloud, and much of local AI run on that kernel. In 2005, furious with BitKeeper, he wrote Git<\/strong> in days \u2014 the Git<\/a> which is now the foundation of CI\/CD. He also maintains Subsurface (diving software). A Linux Foundation Fellow; he owns the \u201cLinux\u201d trademark.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mark Shuttleworth<\/h2>\n

\"Retrato<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> to fund Ubuntu<\/strong> (\u201chumanity toward others\u201d). Ubuntu is Debian with a cadence, a desktop your relative installs, and a server the cloud rents.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s social contract with a company in the middle \u2014 Ubuntu\u2019s eternal compromise.<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg<\/h2>\n

\"Retrato<\/p>\n

He is not a free software pioneer. He is the CEO who discovered that Facebook (now Meta<\/strong>) 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<\/strong> (2011) \u2014 server, rack, and power supply specifications the industry copied \u2014 and released React, GraphQL, PyTorch (through FAIR). HHVM fell by the wayside.<\/p>\n

The 2017 line (\u201cthe world\u2019s biggest open source software company without selling software\u201d) was marketing. Meta publishes a lot of code; the product remains closed. OCP and PyTorch are the part that matters in real-world Linux.<\/p>\n

Dave McAllister<\/h2>\n

\"Retrato<\/p>\n

A behind-the-scenes name, not a poster figure. He worked at Adobe (open fonts) and at Red Hat\u2019s 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<\/em> companies pushing open source while Torvalds and Stallman occupy the stage. He remains that type: a community engineer, not a kernel founder.<\/p>\n

Bill Laing<\/h2>\n

\"Retrato<\/p>\n

At Microsoft, Laing was the face of the infrastructure shift: Azure, scale-out servers, joining Open Compute. The 2017 post recalled Ballmer\u2019s 2001 line \u2014 \u201cLinux is a cancer.\u201d In 2014, Satya Nadella said \u201cMicrosoft loves Linux.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Laing later left Microsoft. The shift was not one man\u2019s doing \u2014 it was Nadella, Azure, and the calculation that cloud cannot be built with Windows alone. But the announcement of \u201copening the server design\u201d cited in the original text was real, and Microsoft\u2019s OCP is still there.<\/p>\n

What changed since 2017<\/h2>\n