The man behind the curtain is turning on the PlanetLab node - Patrick Wizard of Oz Gelsinger
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'Powerful voices' in open source software named
LINUX CREATOR Linus Torvalds was named second in a list of the fifty most powerful movers and shakers in open source yesterday.
Mind Touch released a top fifty list of the most influential figures in open source and Linus Torvalds got the number two spot while the Twitter happy founder of O'Reilly Media, Tim O'Reilly was deemed number one by a large margin.
The magic formula behind Mind Touch's top fifty list was called the "Most Powerful Voices (MPV) formula". Mind Touch used seven metrics to tabulate its MPV metric results on input from other third party sites.
Blogging for Mind Touch, Mark Fidelman said it examined the "buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google" and asked them "how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers." Questions included how often they were retweeted, did their blogposts create a buzz and how often they were referenced in the blogosphere.
Okay, it was not quite science and Mind Touch admits that its results favoured active, social-notworking using open source influencers.
"Tim O'Reilly has 1.4 million times more broadcast power reach than the average person, while Mark Hinkle has a respectable 55 times more broadcast power than average," it said.
Linus Torvalds is relatively inactive in online social notworking venues and doesn't offer many Linux-based tweets. But when he does speak up, the Linux developer and larger open source software world listens. µ
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Power does seem to be the buzz word. It does allow u to have a say in many ways and if u have a strong fan base it only makes things easier. Channels of social media are too under it’s deep influence. Other than the popular voices in the open source world, some recently launched search platforms too have made their presence felt. Solr is one of them . I happened to come across an article containing it’s details at http://www.lucidimagination.com/Downloads/LucidWorks-for-Solr/Reference-Guide
@hoohoo sun is no longer, it's now oracle, just a reminder, you don't want to lose touch like some modern journalist :)
Thanks for correcting my ignorance wrt userland. I've not used *BSD so much, I was mistaken.
"*BSD/Linux use GNU for all the user level programs"
No, they don't. The BSDs have their own userland. If you mean the GNU Compiler Collection then you may have a point as all the major BSDs use this, but the BSDs are full operating systems in their own right, including userland.
Of course I did not mean to ignore Linux and the *BSD's. Without those we'd still be paying Sun $15K per Solaris box just to have something to run the above mentioned excellent software.
Interesting metric - loudest voice, who gets paid attention. Certainly O'Rielly's title "Essential System Administration" was a ground breaker for me - it helped me master the essentials of Linux back in 1992/93.
A different metric, perhaps more relevant perhaps not, is enablers: Larry Wall with PERL and I think diff/patch; the creators of GCC (and the GNU Project people in general) must be the most deeply enabling people - remember what it cost to get a UNIX system with C compiler back in the day? ... and of course *BSD/Linux use GNU for all the user level programs; the creators of Apache; the creators of PHP; the creators of Python.
Just my $0.02 worth.