Michael Tiemann
Published for the Week Of October 18, 2004
FOR: Open-source development tools
If open source is the path to future software development, then Michael Tiemann built the tools to pave the way. The 40-year-old vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat is credited with developing the first GNU C++ compiler in 1997.
For this unabashedly proud science and math geek, who started his high school’s computer club, creating the compiler was a dream come true. “When I was in college, I became enamored with compilers,” he said. “The true pinnacle of computer science was writing the great American compiler.”
His achievement--following eight years of toil on the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler project with GNU inventor and MIT guru Richard Stallman--led to many popular open-source technologies and one of the first commercial open-source companies. That company, Cygnus, a tools company founded by Tiemann and two others in 1989, was sold to Red Hat a decade later for $687 million.
Polished and politically wired, Tiemann is as comfortable leading a protest march on San Francisco city hall criticizing proprietary software as he is schmoozing with investment bankers on Wall Street. To some, he is a capitalist bent on making Red Hat the Microsoft of the Linux community, but there is no doubt Tiemann has a place among the movement’s founding fathers.
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“In many ways, he’s taken the software industry back to its roots,” said Chris Maresca, a principal at Olliance Consulting, Palo Alto, Calif.
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Education:
B.S. in computer science engineering, University of Pennsylvania; graduate work, Stanford University
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Yahoo or google:
Google for search, Yahoo for finance
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Favorite blog:
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor, www.lessig.org/blog/
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Favorite handheld:
iPod
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Most-used app:
Mozilla and increasingly Evolution
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Bush or Kerry:
Kerry
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Carbs or no carbs:
No carbs