The world of open source and Unix has benefitted from the contributions of many advocates in different ways. Perhaps less recognized are the ones who contributed more in voice than in code.
Larry McVoy was born in Concord Massachusetts in 1962. McVoy worked for SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) which bought Unix from Novell and he worked for Sun. Both of these companies had a close tie with Unix. While at Sun, it became apparent to him that Unix was dying. McNealy, Sun's CEO announced that it was throwing away its version of Unix and moving to AT&T's "official" version of Unix. In an attempt to get McNealy to reverse his decision, McVoy set out to write the Sourceware Opearting System Proposal. McVoy urged Sun to give away the source code for its version of Unix. What may seem contradictory, he urged the Unix industry to adopt GNU/Linux. McVoy realized that the fragmented world of Unix was dying because there were many different flavors of Unix, all being maintained with duplicated efforts by many people. This lack of unity was costing billions of dollars and, ultimately, this cost was being handed down to customers. He estimated that Unix was costing customers between $600 - $3000 per seat, while Microsoft's Windows NT cost $150 per seat. What's more, he claimed Unix was stagnant and that users were getting less from Unix and more from Windows NT. McVoy's Sourceware paper, although never published, did make its rounds through Sun. It failed to convince management to reconsider its decision about Unix; in fact, McVoy believes it ruined his career. McVoy's insight did prove accurate as Windows NT pole vaulted to great heights in the corporate world, as proprietary Unix continued to dwindle.
Eric Raymond was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1957. Raymond's father was one of the first programmers and was an executive at Sperry-Univac. Raymond's scholarly interests changed to computer science after a burn out on mathematics. Raymond worked on various open source projects. To better acquaint the world with hackers and to cultivate new ones, Raymond began his work with a new edition of the Jargon File. The Jargon File was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. The Jargon File was a "collection of hacker lore arranged as a dictionary of terms and usages." (pg.146) Here Raymond updated the list to make it complete for the times. As time passed, this once again became out dated. In 1991, Raymond replaced the Jargon File with a book titled "The New Hacker's Dictionary"; published by MIT Press. "The New Hacker's Dictionary "became something of a best seller"; as such, it achieved one of Raymond's major aims in evangelizing about his tribe and its lore" (his tribe being hackers). (pg 147) Raymond followed up this book with another book titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The inspiration for writing "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" came as Raymond received his free copy of Yggdrasil's distribution of GNU/Linux (this was because Yggdrasil rewarded the hacker community by giving a free CD to everyone who contributed to the GNU/Linux project). Raymond was skeptical to say the least, he believed it wasn't possible to create a quality operating system as Linus had, with the aid of a mob. To his surprise, Linux was better than he had expected, which led him to replace the proprietary Unix on his home PC, with GNU/Linux. The ability of a mob to create quality software went against everything he understood. This encouraged Raymond to study the open source movement. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was an exposition of his research. Raymond believed that the primary reason why hackers created software was based upon a desire for peer esteem. That is, hackers create and contribute to software for the peer esteem. The author disapproves of Raymond's belief that hackers thrive on peer esteem. Instead, the author accepts a different viewpoint; this viewpoint compares hackers with artists and explains hacker's ambition to create quality software as an inner necessity to do so. Still, Raymond's desire to help newbie hackers and inspire existing ones, led him to write another book titled, "The Art of Unix Programming". To this day, Raymond is still dedicated to furthering the hacker cause.
Donald Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1938 and is considered the grandfather of the free software movement. His greatest contribution was a program called TEX (the E should be lower than the T and X). In the 1970's, a lower quality photo-optical typesetting technology was introduced. This meant that the layout of some books suffered in quality; being an author, Knuth was a victim of this. Like any good hacker, Knuth set out to create software to eliminate this nuisance. TEX was the product of this ingenuity, and before long, others were harnessing its power to create beautiful books. As the number of TEX users grew, bugs were being reported and code enhancements were being requested. This was both satisfying and terrifying for Knuth, as he liked for his software to mature, yet, he hadn't planned on making TEX his life; after all, "I had only one life to live." (pg. 157) Moreover, Knuth's other contribution to the world of computing was his volume of books titled "The Art of Computer Programming."