The tables below, list some of Google's eclectic mix of open source luminaries grouped by project.
No doubt I've forgotten some, so don't hesitate to contact me with corrections/additions.
Note also this list of
Google's open source projects.
| Python |
| Alex Martelli | Python Cookbook, ... |
| Brett Cannon | Python |
| Jeremy Hylton | Zope |
| Neal Norwitz | PyChecker |
| Collin Winter | functional, unladen swallow |
| Mark Pilgrim | Books, libs |
| Anthony Baxter | release manager, libs |
| Jim Hugunin | numeric, jython, ironpython |
| Linux Kernel |
| Andrew Morton | |
| Daniel Phillips | |
| Ted T'so | |
| Ross Biro | |
| Paul Menage | |
| Richard Gooch | |
| Tom Herbert | Networking |
| Eric Dumazet | Networking |
| Subversion (Google Code) |
| Ben Collins-Sussman | |
| Brian W. Fitzpatrick | |
| Daniel Berlin | |
| Greg Stein | |
| Peter Lundblad | |
| Eric Gillespie | |
| Mozilla / Chromium |
| Ben Goodger | |
| Darin Fisher | |
| Brian Ryner | |
| Fritz Schneider | |
| Mike Pinkerton | |
| Aaron Boodman | GreaseMonkey |
| Eric Seidel | WebKit |
| Peter Beverloo | WebKit |
| John Barton | Firebug |
| Community relations |
| Chris DiBona | from Slashdot |
| Andy Hertzfeld | from Apple, Eazel |
| Jason Robbins | tigris.org |
| Tim Bray | from Sun |
| Zaheda Bhorat | from Openoffice |
| Zach Brown | Kernel Traffic |
|
| Misc |
| Rob Pike | UNIX, UTF8 |
| Ken Thompson | UNIX, UTF8 |
| Russ Cox | Plan9, RE2 |
| Eric Grosse | Plan9, Netlib |
| Peter Weinberger | aWk |
| Stuart Feldman | Make |
| Van Jacobson | TCP/IP, tcpdump, ... |
| Vint Cerf | TCP/IP |
| Udi Manber | Glimpse |
| Raph Levien | Gimp, Ghostscript, ... |
| Peter Mattis | Gimp |
| Spencer Kimball | Gimp, Gnutella |
| Josh MacDonald | PRCS, xdelta, GTK+ |
| Junio Hamano | git |
| Sean Egan | Pidgin |
| Jon Trowbridge | Gnome/beagle |
| Behdad Esfahbod | Gnome, HarfBuzz, ... |
| Scott James Remnant | dpkg, upstart, ... |
| Ronald S. Bultje | ffmpeg |
| Craig Silverstein | distcc, ... |
| Dan Kegel | Wine, crosstool, ... |
| Ian Lance Taylor | GNU toolchain |
| Roland McGrath | GNU Make, glibc, ... |
| Stefano Lattarini | GNU AutoMake, ... |
| Diego Novillo | GCC optimization |
| Daniel Ehrenberg | Factor |
| Glen Murphy | Browser stuff |
| Joe Gregorio | Atom, python libs |
| Han-Wen Nienhuys | Lilypond |
| Bruno Albuquerque | openBFS |
| T. V. Raman | Emacspeak |
| Murray Stokely | FreeBSD core team |
| Nik Clayton | FreeBSD docs, ... |
| Amit Singh | OS X system stuff |
| Frank Mayhar | UNIX kernel stuff |
| Ben Laurie | openssl, apache-ssl |
| Neil Fraser | diff-match-patch, ... |
| Bernie Innocenti | OLPC |
| Tim Hockin | linux system utils |
| Avery Pennarun | bup, redo, ... |
| Adam Langley | ObsTCP |
| Michal Zalewski | security tools |
| Tavis Ormandy | security tools |
| Chris Evans | vsftpd, security ... |
| James Youngman | findutils, ... |
| Brad Fitzpatrick | web server tools |
| Robert Love | Gnome/kernel/books |
| David Reveman | compiz, XGL |
| Jean-loup Gailly | zlib |
| Bram Moolenaar | Vim |
| Martin Pool | distcc, launchpad, ... |
| Jeremy Allison | Samba |
| Eric Schmidt (CEO) | Lex |
|
Gradually Google is becoming
less secretive, especially so since 2005/2006. Consequently it can attract high profile people from the open source community, on whose technologies it depends so much.
As well as employing those above and many others involved in open source, it has begun to
interact more with the community.
For example Google has started to release
internal tools,
provide an open source project
hosting service and runs the very cool
Summer of Code initiative.
These are definitely not trivial undertakings. For instance Google has spent the following on the Summer of Code project:
| Project | Students | Amount |
| SoC 2005 | 400 | $2.0M |
| SoC 2006 | 600 | $3.0M |
| SoC 2007 | 900 | $4.5M |
| SoC 2008 | 1125 | $5.6M |
| SoC 2009 | 1000 | $5.0M |
| SoC 2010 | 1025 | $5.6M |
| SoC 2011 | 1116 | $6.1M |
This is money well spent as they get better open source software, kudos from the community and also get an early view of blossoming open source stars.
I notice Fedora as of 2010 has started the "
Fedora Summer Coding" program.
Other notable Google hackers not directly involved in open source are:
| Name | Previous experience |
| Peter Norvig | NASA |
| Andrew Moore | Carnegie Mellon |
| Steve Lawrence | CiteSeer |
| Mike Burrows | altavista, Microsoft (spam research) |
| David Hanson | Microsoft: compiler research |
| Martin Taylor | Microsoft: linux strategist, VP of live |
| Joe Beda | Microsoft: Avalon, IE |
[Update Jan 2023:
Google have been quite draconian with layoffs in open source areas
of the company, with
illustrious open source folks being let go]