>With the possible exception of Richard Stallman, ESR has clearly been the most influential explainer of free software to non-programmers.

That's funny, since ESR has made his career ATTACKING "free software" and trying to destroy everything RMS has done, not explain it.

I would say that Michael Teimann (founder of Cygnus Solutions in 1989, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat) deserves credit as one of the most influential, constructive, and successful explainers (and developers, and leaders, and entrepreneurs) of free software and open source.

And Michael Teimann, unlike Eric Raymond, has actually written a WHOLE LOT of excellent, practical, widely used code himself. (Like the Gnu C++ compiler and debugger.) And he was explaining free software in 1989, years before Raymond ever started, by successfully explaining and selling millions of dollars worth of his free software company Cygnus's services to Sun, Sony, and many other clients. "We make free software affordable." And he's not bat shit crazy or racist, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. He was the chief technical officer of Red Hat. He served on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the GNOME Foundation advisory board, and the board of directors of ActiveState Tool Corp. He is also co-owner with Amy Tiemann of Manifold Recording Studios.

>He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU Debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS. Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

https://opensource.com/business/14/8/interview-michael-tiema...

>How to think like open source pioneer Michael Tiemann

>Ancient Greece had its Great Explainers, one of whom was Plato. The open source community has its Great Explainers, one of whom is Michael Tiemann.

>From a conference room on the 10th floor of Red Hat's Raleigh, NC headquarters, Tiemann is prognosticating. The place affords the kind of scope he relishes: broad, sweeping, stretched to a horizon that (this morning, anyway) seems bright. As the company's VP of Open Source Affairs explains what differentiates an open source software company from other firms in a crowded market, he exhibits the idiosyncrasy that has marked his writing for decades: the tendency to pepper his exposition of open source principles with pithy maxims from a diverse range of philosophers, politicians, political economists, and popular writers. It's a habit borne, he says, of the necessity of finding something that resonates with the many skeptics he's confronted over the years—because necessity, he quips (quoting Plato, of course), is the mother of all invention.

[...]

>The view was not always as clear. In 1987, when Tiemann was struggling to find a way into the fast-moving market for compilers, he stumbled upon the writing (and the code) of Richard Stallman. Because the code for the GNU C compiler was open, Tiemann was able to properly study it and port it to new architectures—with results that trumped even the most polished efforts of the time.

[...]

>"By making small contributions to this code, I became a member of a community which aggregated all their enhancements as well," Tiemann says. "And so I put in a little, and I got back a lot, and that seemed to me to be an outrageously great trade. And it seemed to everyone else that they were making a great trade, too."

>So trade he did. In 1989, Tiemann established Cygnus Solutions, the world's first open source software company. Each of the company's three co-founders put up $2,000 to get the business moving (the amount should have been $5,000 apiece, but Tiemann couldn't afford it). But what Plato once said held true: "The beginning in every task is the chief thing." A decade later, Cygnus merged with Red Hat in a deal worth $687 million.

[...]

>More than a decade has passed since Cygnus' merger with Red Hat. From 1999 to 2008, Tiemann worked as Red Hat's CTO and helped architect the relationships that propelled Linux into the enterprise. He also served as president of the Open Source Initiative, stepping down in 2012. As Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs, Tiemann continues the meticulous work of tracking open source trends—not all of which excite him.

[...]

>"What encourages me," he says, "is that there is a lot of positive energy from both the younger people getting into open source as well as the older people who have seen the generational ebb and flow of proprietary versus open systems, and I think that there still are a lot of people who are not as interested in seeing what can be destroyed as they are in seeing what can be built."

>Plato was adamant: The world we know today may change, but the perfect forms persist. As a new generation of open-minded advocates take up the cause, one can only hope they build something in harmony with the laws of an open source universe—which Michael Tiemann will gladly explain.