Open source

Nat Friedman

Former GitHub CEO who launched Copilot and now leads product at Meta Superintelligence Labs

Born 1977

Dries Buytaert

Belgian creator of the Drupal content-management system

Born 1978

Chris Wanstrath

Co-founder and former CEO of GitHub

Born 1985

Linus Torvalds

Finnish-American creator of the Linux kernel and Git

Born 1969

Jeff Atwood

Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse

Tim O'Reilly

Tech publisher who popularised the terms “open source” and “Web 2.0”

Born 1954

Theo de Raadt

Founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Born 1968

Matt Mullenweg

Co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic

Born 1984

Guido van Rossum

Dutch programmer who created the Python programming language

Born 1956

Bram Moolenaar

Dutch programmer who created the Vim text editor

Larry Wall

Linguist-programmer who created the Perl programming language

Born 1954

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Italian programmer who created the Redis database

Born 1977

Richard Stallman

Founder of the free software movement and the GNU Project

Born 1953

Rasmus Lerdorf

Danish-Canadian programmer who created PHP

Born 1968

Mitchell Baker

Lawyer who led the Mozilla project and launched the Firefox browser

Michael Widenius

Finnish programmer who created MySQL and MariaDB

Born 1962

Mark Shuttleworth

South African entrepreneur who founded Ubuntu and flew to the space station

Born 1973

Jack Dongarra

Creator of the numerical libraries and benchmarks behind supercomputing

Born 1950

Ian Murdock

Founder of Debian, one of the most influential Linux distributions

1973 – 2015

Audrey Tang

Taiwanese programmer who became Taiwan’s first digital minister

Born 1981

Tom Preston-Werner

GitHub co-founder who created Gravatar, Jekyll and TOML

Born 1979

Ryan Dahl

Creator of Node.js and Deno

Born 1981

Eric S. Raymond

Author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative

Born 1957

Bruce Perens

Author of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative