15 Open-Source Business Influencers

Torvalds revolutionized the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmers on the Internet.

Baker is the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and chairwoman and former CEO of Mozilla Corp., whose Firefox browser boasts 150 million users and rivals Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Milinkovich is the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, the nonprofit consortium of software companies that supports the Eclipse open development platform that has become one of the world’s most successful open-source communities.

Golden, senior vice president of Bank of America, is a top corporate advocate of open source, having worked exclusively with Linux and open-source software in several multimillion-dollar enterprise initiatives.

As the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Zemlin works with Linux stakeholders to accelerate the growth of the platform.

Fenton and Augustin are two prominent venture capitalists who specialize in open source. Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006 after seven years at Accel Partners, where his investments included JBoss, XenSource and Zimbra. Augustin, one of the group who coined the term “open source,” founded VA Linux, launched SourceForge.net, and is now an angel investor and advisor to early-stage tech firms.

Jagielski is co-founder, chairman and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Apache is focused on the strength of its community and the individuals in the community, and Apache members are the core of the community.

Tiemann is president of the Open Source Initiative, an organization dedicated to promoting open-source software.

Sun’s acquisition of MySQL will put MySQL CEO Mickos–whose business card lists him as “Open Sourcerer”–in a position to inject the experience of running a successful open-source company.

Though now “retired” from the industry, Fleury sold his company, JBoss, to Red Hat for $350 million and is responsible for the “JBoss multiplier” effect on the valuation of prominent open-source-based companies.

Johnson is CEO of SpringSource, developer of the Spring Framework for speeding development of Java apps for enterprise servers. SpringSource caused a buzz in January by acquiring Covalent, whose products and services target Apache Software Foundation projects, such as the Tomcat and Geronimo application servers.

The CEO of Sun Microsystems and champion of open source inside Sun and outside to customers, Schwartz oversaw the open-sourcing of numerous Sun technologies, including Java.

Shuttleworth is founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu Foundation, as well as steward of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Roberts is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM, which put open-source CRM (customer relationship management) software on the map. Roberts established SugarCRM’s commercial open-source business model, co-led the product design of SugarCRM products and helped build the Sugar Community into one of the largest open-source communities on the Web.