Please stop referring to him as "this guy", he's well known in the BSD and Linux worlds. He had commit access to FreeBSD before many things we take for granted today even existed. His name is Matt Dillon and he's one hell of a hardware/OS hacker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_%28computer_scienti...
I'm an offender of the 'this guy' thing. I have heard of Matt before, but come on, there is almost no context as to who he is given in the posting, and do you really expect everyone in this community to know every semi-significant kernel hacker of the last 2 decades?
The link is nice for everyones education, but I, for one, would appreciate a little less condescension.
Referring to Matt Dillon at "This guy" is akin to referring to Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, Jony Ives, Zed Shaw, John Gruber, etc.. as "This Guy" - particularly in this community - everyone should know who Matt Dillon is.
And, yes, I would expect everyone in this community to recognize who these people are, and roughly what their contributions have been.
I'm sorry but no, its not on the same "scale" of being universally known. You see, I'm in this industry from there late 80s, and I know who Lunus is but I have no idea who is Matt Dillon, I was never too much into BSD, mostly using Linux, but I think even most Windows guys know who Linus is but I doubt that many of them even know who is Theo (I do).
> And, yes, I would expect everyone in this community to recognize who these people are, and roughly what their contributions have been.
I'm sorry but I (and everyone else) don't owe no one any such things. This is excepting too much from people. Yes, not knowing who is Linus, or Bill Gates or Woz would be strange, but its ridiculous to say that Madd Dillon is as well known. I can't (and don't want to) know every significant linux/bsd contributor. I have enough information filling up my limited brains as it is.
My mother knows who Linus, Bill Gates, and Woz are. These are people who have MSM (Main Stream Media) recognition.
Within the Hacker community, anybody who's been "in the industry from the late 80s" should have awareness of around a couple hundred or so major figures, most of whom my mother would not know. Pundits like John Gruber (MG Siegler, Sarah Lacy, Michael Arrington) are perhaps better known in the HN community than those outside of it - but I would expect everyone who has been around any hacker community for a couple decades would recognize Names like Dennis Ritchie, Guido Van Rossum, Richard Stevens, Larry Wall, Tannenbaum, Bill Joy, etc...
In addition to this group of people, People like Matt Dillon should be on your peripheral Radar, even if you don't follow BSD that closely. I've never run FreeBSD/DragonFly BSD, and even I recognized his name.
I'm not suggesting you memorize every last hacker/pundit of any note, but there is just a core _canon_ of people that we reasonably should be expected to know - it's knowledge like this that ties the broader hacker communities together.
I only know of John Gruber because he is mentioned/linked to on HN so often, same with Zed Shaw.
if I google Matt Dillon, I only get things about an American actor. So I can't really think of a any reason that I would have heard of him, since this is the first thing that I have read (afaik) that has mentioned him at all. If he was writing a popular technical blog on top of his work then I'm sure I would have.
Of course that is not to disparage his work at all, there are many people who do extremely impressive, valuable things but receive little fame. Even amongst educated people you would probably struggle to find someone who could tell you who invented the combustion engine (Étienne Lenoir) but I'm sure many could name the members of the latest fad pop music group.
It's just that some people are pushing into the spotlight more than others, or more likely they get there on purpose. Some people are happy doing good work in the background and only want recognition amongst a small group of peers.
- Dennis Ritchie of course, and Kernighan too (though I had to google for how to write it)
- Gruber and Arrington - yes
- Siegler and Lacy - no
- Van Rossum, Wall - of course
- Tannenbaum - yes,
- Stevens - no idea
- Joy - rings a bell, but still no idea.
you see, I'm not really into remembering names, especially of the people I'm not in close contact with. I only remember then if they are pounded on me for a while ;)
I'd say three, although the work of the third one (which I'd assert is Theo) is more obscure it's pretty darn critical and influential[0]. Unless the two you were thinking of are Linus and Theo?
Zed Shaw gets props from me for being a great teacher. Lamson/Mongrel2 alone are huge contributions to the community. And regardless - I wasn't suggesting that he's on par with Linus or Theo, I'm just suggesting that in our community, he's a well known name. Definitely someone my mother would not know, but I'd expect anyone who's been on HN for a couple years to recognize.
Even before FreeBSD, I had the pleasure of interacting with him as a customer of Best Internet. He invented the concept of having multiple domains hosted on the same server back in '94.
