April 5, 2007

Free Software Hacker Name Chains

OK, this is entirely random. At FOSDEM this year, I was sitting in front of Jeremy Allison and Allison Randal. I mentally placed Randal Schwartz on the end to make a 3-person free software hacker name chain. How many more are there, I wondered?

Here's what I have so far, thanks to a little help from Wikipedia. The first one is a perfect 10, as all the names match exactly and they are all free software people. In order of decreasing quality, then:

  • Jeremy Allison (Samba) -> Allison Randal (Perl) -> Randal Schwartz (Perl)
  • Rusty Russell (ipchains/netfilter) -> Russ(ell) Nelson (OSI) -> Nelson Bolyard (NSS)
  • Kristoffer Ericson (jlime Linux) -> Eric Raymond (fetchmail) -> Raymond Chen (Er... Microsoft; never mind)
  • Brian Paul (Mesa) -> Paul Vixie (cron)
  • George Williams (FontForge) -> William Jolitz (386BSD)

Also, a guy called Rick Adams founded UUNet, and I'm sure there are plenty of free software programmers beginning with "Adam".

Can anyone improve on my chains, or produce ones of their own?

Posted by gerv at April 5, 2007 5:58 PM
Comments

Five pounds sterling to anyone finding a chain where the middle person is either Gervase Markham or Linus Torvalds :)

- Chris

Posted by: Chris Cunningham at April 5, 2007 5:46 PM

Wouldn't a perfect 10 be a closed chain, where the last name loops back to the first one?

Anyway, for your name I only have this so far:

Gervase Markham -> Markham Asylum (where they used to keep open source hackers back when everyone thought we were crazy)

Posted by: Myk Melez at April 5, 2007 6:22 PM

Raymond counts: http://kernel.osuosl.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS

Posted by: Tom at April 6, 2007 12:17 AM

Yeah, when Allison and I are in the same room, and someone says "Randal will do $something", it gets a bit confusing. :)

Posted by: Randal L. Schwartz at April 6, 2007 2:09 PM

Free Software Hacker Name Chains


ALL the Links *
* » Most popular software
* » All mobile software
* » All PC games

HECAKR All Software

Posted by: D_K321 at April 6, 2007 3:18 PM

It should be possible to get chains larger than three, by avoiding people with names that (like Vixie or Bolyard) are hard to match. For instance:
Brian Paul (mentioned above) => Paul Graham (ibid) => Graham Nelson (Inform)
I suspect it ought to be possible to lengthen both ends of that chain in several different ways, though I don't know the answers off the top of my head. Good candidates for these kinds of chains are people whose first and last names both can be either a first or a last name, e.g., Phillip(s), David(s), Robert(s), Daniel(s) Walter(s), Morgan, James, and so on and so forth. Welsh names are particularly good, but anything that regularly gets used as both surname and given name is a candidate.

Going in the other direction, I'd really like to see a chain with Jarkko Hietaniemi in it.

Posted by: Jonadab the Unsightly One at April 9, 2007 1:46 AM

Jonadab: Good work - that's a chain of four if you add Nelson Bolyard on to the end.

Posted by: Gerv at April 9, 2007 9:47 AM

I'd be a good candidate, if I had contributed significantly anywhere. So far I'm just getting involved in offering code, though I've tried to help out in various ways in several projects over the last few years. Stephen Christopher - that ought to be matchable on both ends.

Posted by: Step at April 10, 2007 8:25 PM

iwant to learn hacker

Posted by: thai22 at April 24, 2007 7:00 AM