PIXLS.US - Faces of Open Source
▻https://pixls.us/articles/faces-of-open-source
Peter really (ahem) throws a light on many amazing luminaries from not only the Free/Open Source Software community, but in some cases the history and roots of all modern computing. He has managed to coordinate portrait sessions with many people that may be unassuming to a layperson, but take a moment to read any of the short bios on the site and the gravity of the contributions from the subjects to modern computing becomes apparent.
Intéressant cette notion de « communauté » des développeurs au travers d’une manière similaire de se comporter.
Everyone that I’ve photographed has been absolutely wonderful. I mean, that’s the first thing about this community: it’s a very gracious community. Everybody was very gracious with their time, and eager to participate. I think people recognize that this is a community they belong to and they really want me to be a part of it, which is really great.
So, I enjoyed my time with everybody. Everybody brought a different, interesting story about things. The UNIX crew from Bell Labs had particularly colorful stories, very interesting sort of historical tidbits about UNIX and Free Software.
Did your working in open source teach you anything beyond computer code in some way? Was there an influence from the people you may have worked around, or the ethos of Free Software in general that stuck with you? Working with this crowd, was there a takeaway for you beyond just the photographic aspects of it?
Absolutely! First of all it’s an incredibly inspiring group of people. This is a group of people that have dedicated, in some cases most of, their lives to the development of software that they give away to the world, and don’t monetize themselves. The work they’re doing is effectively a donation to humanity. That’s incredibly inspiring when you look at how much time goes into these projects and how much time this group of people spends on that. It’s a very humbling thing.
I don’t think it’s an obvious answer that Apple or Google or somebody else would have just come up with this without the open source [contributions]. This stuff is so fundamental, it’s such a basic building block for everything that’s happening now. It may be responsible for the golden age that we’re seeing now. I think it is.
The average teenager they pick up and post a photo to Instagram - they don’t realize that there’s a hundred open source projects at work to make that possible.
