Creators and corporate supporters of the most widely-used freeware programs will meet in a historic summit on April 7 in Palo Alto, CA at the invitation of Tim O’Reilly, President and CEO of O’Reilly & Associates.
The primary goal of the summit is to promote a high-level exchange of ideas and strategies for expanding the acceptance of popular freeware such as Linux, Perl, and Apache, and to expand the understanding of the mission-critical nature of Internet freeware applications such as Bind, Sendmail, Perl, Apache, Mozilla, and Linux.
The Freeware Summit attendees include a list of today’s most influential
freeware–also known as open source software–developers:
- Larry Wall, creator of Perl, the language that has been called “the duct
tape of the Internet,” widely used by system administrators and on nearly
all active Web sites.
- Brian Behlendorf, a founder of the Apache group, which develops the world’s most popular Web server.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, a powerful, popular clone of the UNIX
operating system, noted for its use in multimedia and networking.
- Eric Allman, creator of Sendmail, the mail transport agent that is
responsible for routing and delivery of the overwhelming majority of
Internet e-mail.
- Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, a scripting language designed for
rapid application development and deployment.
- Phil Zimmerman, creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a powerful
cross-platform encryption program that protects the privacy of files and
electronic mail.
- Eric Raymond, independent developer active in the Linux community and
author of the influential paper, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”
- Paul Vixie, creator and maintainer of Bind, the software behind the Domain Name System (DNS).
Companies that have stated a strong interest in supporting freeware will
also be attending. In addition to Tim O’Reilly, participants will include
Tom Paquin, Netscape Fellow and manager of the “mozilla” open source
Netscape browser release, and representatives from Scriptics (Tcl),
Songline Studios, and C2Net (Stronghold).
