Survey of FOSS Project Origins

• Linux
  • Torvalds was a student, read Tanenbaum's book
  • Moved to the US,
• C++
  • Bjarne was at Bell Labs
• GCC
  • GNU project
• Clang/LLVM
  • Lattner was a grad student in compilers
  • Then developed LLVM at Apple for many years
• Python
  • Guido was a research programmer in the Netherlands (Tanenbaum's lab)
  • Moved to the US, the US defense organization CNRI funded Python
  • Python funded by various corporations, including Google
• Ruby
  • Hobbyist Origins
• Ruby on Rails
  • DHH started it and has maintained it, while also working on commercial SaaS
• Perl
  • Hobbyist Origins
• sqlite
  • Hipp started the project, formed a small corporation around it
• Redis
  • Hobbyist, then Redis Labs?
• Nginx
  • Hobbyist, then a company?

Academic

• Lua
  • Academic Research sponsored by industry

Named after industrial monopolies:

• SBCL - Steel Bank Common Lisp (CMU)
• SML - Standard ML of New Jersey (Princeton, NJ and Bell Labs in NJ)

Corporate

• JVM
  • Sun
• Go
  • Google

TODO

• X.org
  • Unix vendors wanted to commodotize Sun ?
• KDE
• GNOME
• Debian
  • Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens (Pixar?)
  • https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/project-history.en.txt