Larry Page
Co-founder and CEO, Google and Alphabet
PageRank, then giving away the mobile operating system
Rating
96Impact score
Domains
SearchAndroidInfrastructure
Scouting report
Co-invented PageRank as a Stanford graduate student and co-founded Google in 1998, serving as CEO twice. Two decisions on his watch had enormous open source consequence: Android was released permissively and given to handset makers, which is why most phones run a Linux kernel, and Chromium was open-sourced, which is why nearly every non-Safari browser is a Chromium derivative.
Curator’s note
The most consequential giving-away of code by a company that was not trying to be an open source company.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Larry Page by Marcin Mycielski, European Parliament (Stansfield), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
- 01Larry Page en.wikipedia.org
- 02Android (operating system) en.wikipedia.org
- 03Chromium en.wikipedia.org