Post B2ZYn2mLbwWc88VYYq by ploum@mamot.fr
 (DIR) More posts by ploum@mamot.fr
 (DIR) Post #B2ZYn2mLbwWc88VYYq by ploum@mamot.fr
       2026-01-22T20:04:03Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Idea: "The unbillionaires list", to promote contributors to the common.A collaborative website that lists people who created something useful to millions but purposedly choose to put in in the common and didn’t earn money directly from it (or not as much as expected)Besides those listed in https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.htmlI would add Henri Dunant (Red Cross, he died in great poverty), Didier Pittet (who invented the hydroalcoolic gel we now use everyday).
       
 (DIR) Post #B2ZYn4Ha1J6OnI80si by teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe
       2026-01-23T09:41:09Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Some nominees whom I've been blessed to have known personally over the decades, albeit these are mostly US citizens (I'm from California this time around incarnated as a human, so those biases are largely due to geographic "privilege" for the misfortune of being born in the land of the fee and home of the slave, subjugated to a mercenary industrial complex, a medical industrial complex a for profit prison carceral slavery industrial complex as are pervasive in these realms, among others). Note, this list is extremely abbreviated, I know a lot more folks who probably deserve such nominations:Doug Engelbart (headed the Augment group at Stanford Research Institute which begat NLS [oNLine System] which later caught the attention of JCR Licklider who provided [D]ARPA funding evolving NLS into what became known as the Internet. Among myriad innovations, Doug was said something to the effect of: "we [NLS] had links too, but there was nothing 'hyper' about them.").Bill English (another in Doug's Augment group at SRI, whom Doug attributed the invention of the mouse, also more or less pioneered the field of ergonomics).Marshall Kirk McKusick (helped implement the aforementioned BSD TCP/IP stack while a student at UC Berkeley, which infamously beat out BBN's TCP/IP implementation because: BBN's, despite initially performing faster, crashed, whereas the BSD TCP/IP stack kept chugging along more reliably. Lamentably, he was not able to present such work as part of his doctoral thesis and instead focused that research on MC68000 register allocations [he claimed maybe "six people" ever bothered to read it at MeetBSD 2014 and I am pretty sure I was maybe among those six when I was younger and striving to learn more about MC68k asm optimization techniques] also one of the co-authors of 1989's "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD UNIX Operating System" later reprised as: "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" also helped implement the FFS [Fast File System] and tools such as fsck. If Linux is popular today? It never would have become popular without the popularity of UNIX before it and Kirk was among the BSD folks who made UNIX something worth running outside of Bell Labs' corporate largess with their sources shared freely with the rest of the world.)Jordan Hubbard (one of the co-founders of FreeBSD and even decades after his last commit to that project, still ranked within the top 10 of all time FreeBSD committers by commit count. Also a co-founder of DarwinPorts [later renamed to MacPorts] and one of the reasons why OS X/macOS has a BSD derived user and instead of Apple's previous proprietary Mac OS [System 1 through System 9]. Last I heard, jkh was working at NVIDIA, and is probably one of the reasons why their Linux drivers have supposedly improved in recent years).Theo de Raadt (founder of OpenBSD, previously part of the core developers of NetBSD. Born in South Africa, but residing in Canada for an awfully long time. In addition to making their source tree available on the web via https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ in the mid 1990s, more than a decade before GitHub was even conceived of as a proprietary webUI to libre/free DVCS tool git, instrumental in helping to take a UNIX /usr/src and auditing the source with a team of security experts, helping to remove a lot of the "low hanging fruit" of exploit vectors and raising the bar for everyone. Forked SSH into OpenSSH after Tatu Ylonen and ssh.com decided to make it closed sores and proprietary; Niels Provos, then a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, by virtue of being a German citizen, would drive over the boarder to Canada, to contribute code to OpenSSH, just to make sure that no US cryptographic export legislation was being violated. Similarly, when Darren Reed decided to stick to his guns with regards to failing to clarify IPF's license, OpenBSD developers created pf [later ported to FreeBSD, OS X, macOS, Linux and even Windows]. Various licensing audits have been performed of code in OpenBSD and it has spawned other projects such as: LibreSSL, OpenBGPD, rpki-client, OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD, GoT [Game of Trees, an ISC licensed git compatible DVCS which is evolving gotwebd, a webUI complementary to the co-creation of gothub.org which aims to be akin to GitHub, without the proprietary Micro$oft owned underpinnings, also led by Stefan Sperling, also a European AFAIK]. As of OpenBSD 5.5, all known y2k38 bugs were fixed, something that I think Linux still has failed to address [I can only imagine RHEL/IBM and Oracle/Solaris, etc. sorts may be salivating at the lucrative service contracts to fix similar things for their commercial customers])萩野(伊藤)いとぢゅん aka Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino (hopefully unsurprisingly: Japanese. Unlike a lot of the PhDs whom I have known over the decades, one of the few [perhaps only] individuals I ever encountered who had commit access to NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD simultaneously. Deeply involved with the KAME project and instrumental for IPv6 adoption into the major three BSDs and from there, to much of the rest of the world. Incredibly kind and cooperative, his untimely passing is a deep tragedy.)Daniel J. Bernstein (I'm not even sure where to begin, but daemontools set the stage in UNIX for what would eventually become common practice with things such as launchd, OpenRC, probably even systemd in Linux stole a lot of ideas that djb pioneered. Similarly, qmail took the security nightmare that was SMTP in the sendmail [pejorative: sendwhale] era and showed off not just resilient secure code, but process and privilege separation to the extreme, Postfix and later OpenSMTPD would derive inspiration from djb's trail blazing. djbdns would do a similar thing to provide a saner secure alternative to BIND, years before NSD and Unbound attempted to follow in similar footsteps with NLSNet backing. Similarly, djb's DNSCurve attempts to provide encryption to name resolution and such, without many of the amplification attack pitfalls of DNSSEC. While unfortunately a lot of djb's code is not widely deployed, it has influenced other secure development practices and his website is still up, even when collaborative projects in parallel research such as tcpcrypt.org, have fallen to the wayside).Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon (creator of nmap, which came to notoriety in PHRACK and has even appeared in Hollywood movie cameos such as The Matrix franchise, but remains, to this date: libre/free open source software and continues to be actively maintained and updated. Extremely useful for network administrators and penetration testers alike.)Александр Песляк aka Solar Designer (Russian security researcher perhaps best known for the libre/free open source tool John the Ripper. While East Coast Murican "hackers" were trying to profit off of l0phtcrack, jtr was truly free. I guess l0phtcrack opened their source code in 2021? I kind of stopped paying attention decades earlier, because better tools were freely available without shareware handicaps and the source was there to audit. Admittedly, I did also meet the author of crackerjack which was a friend's preferred passphrase hash cracker in the early 1990s, but that was at DefCon in the mid 2000s and probably a conversation and side story best ignored for now.)And some, whom I haven't been blessed to know personally despite having benefited from their contributions:L. Peter Deutsch (featured in Stewart Brand's article in Rolling Stone on Spacewar from 1972, which was probably one of the first mainstream media mentions of the term "hacker" before it became demeaned, as in: "More than a hacker, in the opinion of a colleague, 'although he has someof that style. He's a virtuoso.'" His contributions are too numerous to list here exhaustively, but Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter is highlighted by Wikipedia, and that's certainly worth mentioning).Bob Fabry (helped bring UNIX to UC Berkeley, also helped create CSRG [Computer Systems Research Group] out of which BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution] co-evolved, instrumental in helping TCP/IP become the underlying protocol choice for the Internet (previously, it was NCP [Network Control Program] from SRI/Engelbart's team).Bill Yeager (a staff researcher at Stanford University, invented the first multi-protocol router in 1980–1981 to connect disparate network systems. Basically, Cisco ripped off his work and started charging money for their boxes which were essentially running code for which Yeager was largely responsible. There was a lawsuit between Stanford and Cisco and it was settled and Stanford got some kickbacks, but Yeager basically didn't, at all. Once upon a time the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, at least had a plaque commemorating his contributions, but last time I visited it was gone. No doubt the gorilla of Cisco didn't like the negative [if truthful] portrayal of their non commercial academic predecessor and pulled enough strings to get that removed from public display.)Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou, Paul Vixie (I have however, worked with Paul's nephew! I'm lumping these folks together though the first four were instrumental in the co-creation of BIND [the reference DNS server implementation] Vixie helped promulgate it, particularly thanks to the creation of ISC [Internet Software Consortium] which also begat DHCP [Dynamic Host Control Protocol]. Without DNS, the Internet would be a much more cumbersome thing to utilize though I still side with Surak, that the commercialization and charging money for DNS registrations via ICANN and registrars, was a money grabbing move and a complete mistake. Perhaps someday, we'll have a "Let's Encrypt" for DNS? AlterNIC doesn't seem to be pulling their weight unfortunately and I hail from a time when DNS was entirely free as it should be. Domain squatter opportunists are the worst sort of profiteers.)Cynbe Ru Taren aka Jeff Prothero (years before the FSF and GNU were a thing, Cynbe had already released Citadel into the public domain as BBS software. There are more forks of Citadel than I can easily enumerate, despite having been a [co]SysOp of various BBSes running everything from Macadel and MacCit to Cit86, Cit68k, GremCit and Cit/UX [which last I checked, continues to evolve as groupware]. Though he also toiled in the commercial sector [and was apparently one of the members of Cisco's elite gigabit networking group back when a gigabit per second speeds were still bleeding edge] he continued to contribute to the libre/free open source realms with things such as Mythryl, a programming language that is probably still beyond most mortals' comprehension).I could go on and on, really; but those are some nominees I'd throw out there for starters as well as some of the reasons why I think they're worth including.