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Question: Who are the most famous open source contributors? Please give me the top 30.

Answer:

There is no single official ranking of the “top 30” most famous open source contributors, as fame and influence depend on criteria like historical impact, number of contributors enabled, widespread adoption of projects, commits, stars on GitHub, or ecosystem influence.

The most famous ones are usually those who created foundational open source projects that shaped modern computing. Recent high-activity contributors (e.g., on GitHub in 2025) are highly productive but often less universally “famous” outside developer circles.

Here is a compiled list of 30 highly famous and influential open source contributors (prioritizing historical impact and recognition first, then notable modern maintainers):

  1. Linus Torvalds — Creator of the Linux kernel and Git.
  2. Richard Stallman — Founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation.
  3. Dennis Ritchie (†) — Co-creator of C and Unix (foundational to open source).
  4. Ken Thompson — Co-creator of Unix and Go language.
  5. Guido van Rossum — Creator of Python.
  6. Bjarne Stroustrup — Creator of C++.
  7. Tim Berners-Lee — Inventor of the World Wide Web (HTML/HTTP).
  8. Larry Wall — Creator of Perl.
  9. Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto — Creator of Ruby.
  10. James Gosling — Creator of Java (though now more corporate).
  11. Brendan Eich — Creator of JavaScript.
  12. Ryan Dahl — Creator of Node.js and Deno.
  13. Rasmus Lerdorf — Creator of PHP.
  14. Brian Kernighan — Co-author of C and Unix tools.
  15. Theo de Raadt — Founder of OpenBSD.
  16. Theo Ts’o — Long-time Linux kernel maintainer (ext4 filesystem).
  17. Greg Kroah-Hartman — Linux kernel stable tree maintainer.
  18. Sindre Sorhus — Prolific npm package creator and awesome lists maintainer.
  19. Fabian “ryg” Giesen / Notable modern — Influential in demoscene and code (but more Sindre as prolific).
  20. Evan You — Creator of Vue.js.
  21. Dan Abramov — Co-creator of Redux and React contributor.
  22. Sebastian McKenzie — Creator of Parcel and Babel maintainer.
  23. TJ Holowaychuk — Creator of Express.js.
  24. Jake Wharton — Major Android open source contributor (Square, Kotlin).
  25. Anthony Fu — VueUse and modern JS ecosystem maintainer.
  26. Kent C. Dodds — Educator and Remix/Testing Library contributor.
  27. Addy Osmani — Google engineer, web performance advocate.
  28. TJ Fontaine — Former Node.js lead.
  29. Rich Harris — Creator of Svelte.
  30. Jason Miller — Preact creator.

This list blends all-time legends (who created entire ecosystems) with highly visible modern contributors who maintain extremely popular projects.

Many thousands of others have made massive contributions (especially to Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla, etc.), but these names appear most frequently in “influential” and “famous” discussions.

References:

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