February 22, 2010, 10:59 AM — The hero and the villain. It's the age-old formula that pervades today's reality TV showdowns, the shenanigans of professional wrestling and cinematic classics like Star Wars. Tech is no different, with its passionate heroes who balance profit with innovation and social responsibility, and the money-mad, egomaniac villains who simply cannot be trusted. Here's a look at tech's good guys and bad guys.
HEROES: Linus Torvalds
He is the beloved man behind the penguin. Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and operating system, is a hero to proprietary software-hating developers everywhere. The open-source movement, where software code is developed in a collaborative way and shared, has become a driving force in computing. It all started with the modest Torvalds, and he remains open source's ambassador.
Don't Fear the Penguin: a Newbie's Guide to Linux
Slideshow: Top 10 Open Source Apps for Windows
Slideshow: Top 10 Open Source Apps for Mac OS X
Republished with permission from CIO (view original version)
