The GNU project and Richard Stallman certainly deserve some mention and credit here. The omission is somewhat understandable from the standpoint of avoiding arguments about the various personality cults that might arise ("Why mention RMS and omit Linus Torvalds!?")... the potential drama that could result is just not worth wasting the bandwidth. We already saw a touch of that with Mark Shuttleworth on the list. Just think of all the useful code that could be written instead . I suppose we can all agree on just being grateful for all the FLOSS developers and software engineers, period.