Open-source software runs the internet. The servers delivering every webpage, the operating systems powering most smartphones, the databases storing most of the world structured data — the majority of this infrastructure was built by people who gave their work away for free. A small number of those people also built substantial wealth in the process. Here are some of their stories.
Linus Torvalds — The Linux Kernel
In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student posted a message to a technical mailing list announcing he was working on a free operating system kernel as a hobby. Thirty years later, Linux runs on the majority of the world servers, all Android smartphones, and the computers aboard the International Space Station. Torvalds has never commercialised Linux directly, but the ecosystem his work created has generated hundreds of billions in commercial value. He continues to oversee the development of the Linux kernel from his home in Portland, Oregon.
Matt Mullenweg — WordPress and the Open Web
Mullenweg co-created WordPress in 2003 when he was 19 years old. The platform now runs approximately 43 percent of all websites on the internet — an extraordinary piece of infrastructure owned by no corporation and maintained by a global community of contributors. He built Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, into a multi-billion dollar enterprise while maintaining the open-source nature of the core software.
Gavin Wood — Protocol Languages and Standards
Wood invention of Solidity — the programming language enabling developers to write applications running on distributed computing platforms — made him one of the more technically influential figures of the past decade. Giving developers a high-level language for distributed computing lowered the barrier to entry for an entire category of software development. His subsequent work on Polkadot extended his contributions into interoperability infrastructure between distributed networks.
Why This Story Matters
The stories of open-source builders complicate the standard narrative about how wealth is created in technology. Not all of the most consequential contributors to the internet infrastructure built conventional companies or raised venture capital. Some of the most significant work of the past thirty years was done by people motivated primarily by technical curiosity, community belonging and the satisfaction of building things that the whole world can use for free.