Great start! Now, it will be good to make it more visible how these people impacted free software and paved a way for Joomla!. Why do they matter to our community? These are some ideas and points I would like to see this tri-fold cover. I don't really think it matters as much when these people were born and where they work, etc., just hit the main points of what they contributed and why it matters to Joomla!.
1. Front page - Pioneers of Free Software
I think something else should be here - symbols for the GPL, Linux, Open Source Institute, PHP and Joomla! would be nice.
2. What is Free Software?
Focus on the liberties - four freedoms of software - The Free Software Definition
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
3. Richard Stallman
Free Software Foundation -
http://www.fsf.org/
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute modified computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software,
GNU General Public License, version 2
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-license ... .html - the license that Joomla! uses
Copyleft and the GNU GPL -
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html - What is copyleft?
4. Linus Torvalds
Created Linux kernel for the GNU/Linux system
On September 17, 1991, he posted a message in a Minix users newsgroup, announcing that a rough cut of his creation could be downloaded for free from a university Internet site. Use Linux if you'd like, he instructed people, but any changes, new features, or improvements you devise must be shared with everyone else at no cost. It's an idea he borrowed from Richard Stallman, who had devised the General Public License, an agreement by which entrepreneurs could charge as much as they liked for a program but had to provide access to its source code.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Since then, an enormous industry was born with many distributions of Linux, and big players like Microsoft and IBM found their industry was being redefined by communities developing and supporting free software.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... c/Gldt.svg
5. Eric Raymond
Raymond wrote about community approaches to developing free/open source software.
Author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
Eric Raymond says that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.”
Linus's law, a tenet inspired by Torvalds but coined by Eric S. Raymond in his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." A deep bug is one which is hard to find, and with many people looking for it, the hope (and so far most experience) is that no bug will be deep. Both men share an open source philosophy, which has been in part (and implicitly) based on this belief.
He also understood the importance of appealing to the business sector and, for that reason, helped form the Open Source Initiative (OSI) -
http://www.opensource.org/
Who is OSI? The OSI are the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant.
OSD -
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
Maintain Open Source Licenses -
http://www.opensource.org/licenses
6. Rasmus Lerdorf
creator of the PHP programming language in which Joomla! is written.
Since September 2002, he has been employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer.
His current focus is on increasing awareness of good security practices with PHP and speaks to these issues at conferences and in interviews. At the 2006 OSCMS Conference, Rasmus highlighted areas for improvements that each open source CMS should build into their projects. (Share picture of J! devs talking with Rasmus -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf )
7. Back page
Keep it simple, I think - the logo and For more information, visit Joomla!'s website: joomla.org should be enough.
Anyway, some ideas....Amy