Guest blogger Mike Subelsky shares with us his non-scientific findings on who's doing a lot of novel work with open source. Feel free to nominate your own "open source heroes" in the comments section of this blog entry.

I did a quick survey over Twitter of people in Maryland who are involved in open source software and was amazed at who came out of the woodwork. Here is a quick and certainly non-inclusive list of open source contributors in our state, in no particular order:

• Jim Jagielski: Contributor to Apache, the most popular web server on the planet, and many other projects; also chairman and cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation

• John Trupiano: author of TimeCop, a really cool Ruby gem that helps developers test code that makes time comparisons and computations

• Shea Frederick: Core developer of the ExtJS framework for building rich Internet apps

• Dave Troy: A fellow guest contributor to this blog, creator of Astmanproxy (VoIP), votereport, and other projects

• Scott Paley: Has contributed marketing and documentation and donated staff hours to work on core components of the Plone CMS

• Robert Treat: Contributor to the PostgreSQL database

• Alan Viars: His OMHE (Open Mobile Health Exchange) project is getting picked up by microsyntax.org

• Jason Dixon: Core team member of the OpenBSD operating system

• Avdi Grimm: Author of the Ruby NullDB testing gem (Avdi's a Maryland native who lives in York, PA but frequents our tech scene all the time)

• Mark Harrison: Creator of helpmeict helpdesk system

• Theo Schlossnagle: Contributor to/creator of various Perl modules, Wackamole, Mungo, and other projects

Could this be a more instructive metric of Maryland technical vitality than statistical measures such as number postgraduate degree holders?