Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizen can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has - Magaret Mead
I was inspired by this XCKD comic where almost a lot of modern web infrastructure is built upon free and open sourced software which some are maintained by a single person for years without any payment or support. In this scenario, if the maintainer decided to quit and a bug is found and not fixed, the consequences could be catastrophic. Because of that, I got curious and decided to see how many technologies are built upon a person who decided to just build something and distribute it for free.
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Imagemagik
Developer: John Cristy; Site: Imagemagick.com
Imagemagik is a software suite for displaying, creating converting, modifying and editing raster images. One major feature of this software that it is possible to do all the task using command line tools only. It is quite popular to use on webapps since everything can be done behind the scene without the need to launch a visual application.
John Cristy wrote this program while working at DuPont in 1987(!!) and freely released in 1990 after Cristy managed to convinced DuPont to transfer the copyright to his own company.
jQuery
Developer: John Resig; Site: jQuery.com
jQuery was the building block of interactive web apps in the early days of Web 2.0. Javascript was there since the early days of the web, but modifying a lot of HTML or DOM elements can be cumbersome. jQuery simplyfy the entire process because it uses the $('selector') syntax to select elements and has a multitude of libraries to easily manipulate the selected HTML or DOM contexts. Add with asynchronized REST calls to a web application server, and you have a working web app.
The early version of jQuery was designed by John Resig and he work on the project for over a year before announcing it to an event in New York. And the rest is basically history. Despite the rise of other framework library every month or every other week, jQuery remains very popular due to it is being very lightweight and ease of use.
LaTeX
Developer: Leslie Lamport; Site: Latex-project.org
LaTeX is an open source implementation of TeX, which that program was written solo by the legendary Donald Knuth, a computer science professor who is famous of devising algorithms to makes the foundations of computer science. LaTeX is a software system for document preparation which convert codes in plaintext into formatted text just like HTML. One of the main features of LaTeX is that it can create pretty looking equations. Because of this, LaTeX is very popular in academia.
The Internet
Developers: Tim Berner-Lee and Vint Cert
To say internet has completely changed the world is an understatement. We all those advancement today from two people: Vint Cert and tim Berners-Lee. Vint Cert is the one who build the communication protocols of the internet called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which governs how one computer communicates to other computers in an open network. Tim Berners-Lee build the first web server, define the HTML language in which how to display webpages, become the midwife to CSS, which give the webpage its color and beauty.
Bonus: Original DOOM engine
Developer: John Carmack; Site: Source Code at GitHub
As a kid grow up in the 90s playing computer games that has CGA and VGA graphics, one’s life at that time would not be complete with out playing DOOM. DOOM was very revolutionary at that time because it was one of the earliest 3D-ish first person shooter. The entire engine was developed by John Carmack which also made th predecessor, Wolfenstien 3D.
Conclusion
The world is build on free ideas and sometimes free software. These unsung heroes toil everyday to make the world turn and we should not only be thankful for them, and should donate to their cause whenever possible.
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