Fifty tech CEOs, scored on what they gave away
opensourcelegends.com has six sets now. Series Six cards the people who ran the companies, which sounds like a poor fit for an open source card collection until you look at what the stat block measures.
Every other set here cards the person who wrote the thing. This one cards the person who decided it would be built, staffed, priced, and given away or not. That last one is the openness score, and it is the reason the set exists.
Lou Gerstner put about a billion dollars of IBM behind Linux in 2000, which did more for enterprise Linux than any amount of advocacy. Scott McNealy published NFS as an open specification, released OpenSolaris, and put Java under the GPL, and OpenJDK is what most Java runs on today. Satya Nadella took over a company whose previous CEO called Linux a cancer, then shipped a Linux kernel inside Windows and bought GitHub. Jensen Huang ships the proprietary driver that got Torvalds on film insulting a graphics vendor, and the same company open sourced its GPU kernel modules in 2022.
Bill Gates is on the list with the Open Letter to Hobbyists and the Sherman Act ruling printed on the same card. Being liked is not the bar.
The template lied on all fifty fronts
Each set starts as a copy of the last one with the roster and the axes swapped. Series Six started as a copy of Series Five.
The crest in the top corner of every card front is a hardcoded string in that template. I changed the palette, the emblem, the four stat axes, every path, the validator and the portrait prompt. I did not change the string. So the first render of all 50 fronts went out with WOMEN IN TECH stamped on the corner of Satya Nadella.
Nothing caught it. Not the typecheck, not the validator, not the build. I found it by opening one published PNG and looking at it, which is exactly how the invented faces got caught two sets ago.
What the checks did catch
44 of the 50 scouting reports were too long. The panel on the card back is sized for about 65 words and the drafts ran 71 to 91, which clips on a printed card. Series Five has zero of those warnings, so the fix was rewriting 44 reports rather than widening the panel.
Of 124 source links, four did not resolve. The Tesla patent pledge post 403s every fetcher. Two Wikipedia articles do not exist under the titles I used. The LinkedIn post carrying The Log, the Jay Kreps essay that taught a generation to treat state as a replayable stream, is gone from its original URL, so that card cites the Wayback Machine instead.
49 of 50 have a real face
A portrait is painted from an identified photograph or the card gets no face. This set resolved 49 on the first pass, the best rate of any set here, because public company CEOs get photographed at conferences by people who upload to Wikimedia Commons.
The gap is Sid Sijbrandij of GitLab. No Commons file, no Wikidata photograph, and the obvious fallback avatar belongs to an account whose API record carries no real name and a very recent id. That is not enough to say it is him, so his card ships with the plate instead.
If you can point me at a properly licensed photo of him, that is the most useful thing you can contribute.
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