Bruce Perens
bruce@perens.com
Phone: 1-510-904-3064 (new number as of June 2009)
PMB 549 (this is a mailbox store, you won't find me there)
1563 Solano Blvd.
Berkeley CA 94707
Summary
I am one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software.
Before that, I played a role in the genesis of 3-D animated feature
film, and am credited on Pixar films.
I'm an executive, an operating systems kernel programmer, a paid public
speaker, a well-published writer, and a specialist in the intersection
of software and law.
I represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the
Information Society. I helped get Linux on the Space Shuttle.
I have a credit on
Toy Story II
and
A Bug's Life.
I was a top strategist and spokesperson for one of the best-known
corporations. I've keynoted many computer conferences, and two law
conferences. I've been featured in two documentaries.
I like to work where different disciplines meet, like computers and
film, or software and law. The most important and creative work goes
on there. I enjoy working with top management and financiers as well
as engineering, PR and publicity, and customers.
Outside Views
Rather than have this be exclusively me writing about myself, here are
some outside sources and the way they see me today:
Competence
- Management
-
Management of software development, management of corporate line
strategy, corporate policy development, small company CEO,
press and public relations (marketing communications), public
speaking, some strategic marketing.
- Programming
-
Ruby on Rails, C, C++, kernel internals and device drivers, assembly
language, microcode, embedded systems, computer language design and
development. Those are my strong ones, but I learn new computer
languages and facilities quickly and can program most anything.
-
Law
-
Expert witness, bridge between legal and engineering, train legal on
Open Source issues and engineering on intellectual property issues,
opening keynote for conferences on Open Source law.
-
Writing
-
Executive editor for 24-book series, have had refereed articles
accepted in software engineering, economics, and law.
-
Public Speaking
-
Have presented to UN, to a nation's congressional body, to several
heads of state. Keynote or speaker at too many conferences to count.
Interesting Things I've Done
-
United Nations
-
In 2005 UNDP, the United Nations Development Program,
asked me to participate in the UN Word Summit on the
Information Society, which was meeting in Tunis, Tunisia.
I was granted partial diplomatic immunity. A video of my
talk is
here
(Ogg Theora format, may require installation of a plug-in).
-
Pixar Films
-
In 1981, I joined the
NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory
,
which was the predecessor of
Pixar
.
Computer graphic 3-D animation was
in its infancy. I joined Pixar in 1987, as employee number 62. I
am credited on
Toy Story II
and
A Bug's Life.
I was an operating systems programmer at both
Pixar and NYIT. When I arrived at Pixar, they were manufacturing
a line of graphics hardware and I was in charge of all systems
programming and first turn-on for a new image computer. I wrote
microcode (lower-level than assembly-language programming) for the
Pixar Image Computer and wrote a behavioral simulation for the
memory controller gate-array in a new image computer. The simulation
allowed us to get the memory controller working in the "first turn"
of our custom chip, at a time when no run-time programmable
gate-arrays were available and a turn of fabrication for an
application-specific integrated circuit took at least a month.
I worked on many projects during my 12 years at Pixar. After they
became successful in film, I worked on a new computer language and framework for image processing, and studio tools for the animators.
-
Open Source
-
I created the
Open Source Definition
,
the manifesto of the Open Source movement in software and definition
of its software licensing rules, as a policy document for
Debian.
About 8 months later, Eric Raymond and I founded the
Open Source Initiative.
I was the first person to announce "Open Source" to the world.
Of course this is standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman and
his Free Software movement.
-
Linux on the Space Shuttle
-
I helped get the
Debian GNU/Linux system on the Space Shuttle
,
by assisting the shuttle "Biosciences" experiment developer
in implementing a feature that wasn't offered "out of the
box" by Linux distributions at that time. This was the first
publicly-acknowledged flight of Linux on a space mission. The
experiment was flown twice in 1997. Shuttle flight STS-83
aborted its mission and returned to earth early due to an
erroneous indication on one of its fuel-cell sensors, leading
to a repeat of the mission on STS-84.
-
World Wide Web Consortium
-
When it looked as if the World Wide Web consortium would vote for
royalty-bearing patents for web standards, Tim Berners-Lee summoned
myself and Eben Moglen to participate as invited experts on the
W3C's patent policy
board, and to help set a royalty-free policy for their standards.
I brought Larry Rosen, another Open Source advocate, on to the
board with me. Here is the
policy
we helped create.
-
Academia
-
-
I am a visiting lecturer with the
University of Agder
(Norway) for more than
three years, under a grant from the Competence Fund of Southern
Norway. This summer I expect to operate a summer session there
for a week or two.
-
I was senior scientist for Open Source with the
Cyber Security Policy Research Laboratory
of George Washington University.
-
Government
-
-
Most recently, I participated in the
TACD Conference
to advise the incoming Obama administration and other national
governments on the policy agenda for intellectual property.
-
In 2007, I met with the President of the Chamber of Deputies in
Italy,
and addressed a committee of the Chamber of Deputies.
The Chamber of Deputies is the lower House of Parliament in Italy.
-
Through University of Agder, I am a frequent consultant to
the Norwegian government's IT rule-making.
I am also affiliated with the
Norwegian Open Source Center
.
-
At Agder, I was the IPR policy consultant of the
European Internet Accessibility Observatory.
and also did some technical consultation.
-
I contributed
criticism
at an early point in the revision of the European
Government's
European Interoperability Framework,
to counter a report that the EU had contracted from Gartner
that was, astonishingly, critical of Open Standards and would
have made European government software procurement less friendly
to Open Source. Subsequent to my work (and many comments from
others) the EU released a
draft
that reiterates its support
of
royalty-free
Open Standards that are friendly to Open Source, and promotes
Open Source in general.
-
I keynoted the EU Government's
Diffuse
conference.
-
Debian
-
I was the second Debian project leader, after founder Ian Murdock.
The
Debian
GNU/Linux distribution is one of the best respected versions of
Linux. The popular Ubuntu system is based upon it.
I built the team from 60 developers to 200, and led the transition
of the system to the modern ELF executable system from its previous
a.out implementation. I set many of the project policies, most of
which still stand today.
-
Morse Code Law
-
I founded
No-Code International
to repeal an international treaty law that required ham
radio operators to pass a test on manual Morse code, decades
after voice communications became the norm.
Mostly this was a matter of lobbying the hams themselves
to ask their national governments and their international
representatives to remove the law. Getting this done took
10 years. I was able to get the process going because as a
ham who had passed a high-speed telegraphy exam, and was not
involved in selling ham radio paraphernalia, I could
represent the cause as someone who believed in it but would
not benefit from the rule change.
Most nations, including the U.S. FCC, first lowered
the required code speed to something reasonable, from a previous
speed that was purposely so high as to to keep people out of ham
radio. Then, the International Telecommunications Union, the
UN's telecommunications treaty body, removed provision S25.5 from
the international telecommunications treaty. This allowed the
nations to eliminate Morse code requirements entirely, and most
did. At this point only Russia is known to have a Morse code
requirement.
-
Electric Fence
-
In the late '80's, I created the
Electric Fence
memory buffer overrun debugger
for Unix, which now also works on Linux and Microsoft Windows.
This debugger was the first to use the memory management hardware
to stop a program on the exact
instruction where a memory buffer overrun occurs. Previously,
there had been no reliable way to find this problem on Unix,
and this caused both applications and the underlying software of
the operating system to be intermittently unreliable, and the problem
was un-diagnosable because it would occur almost randomly in different
areas of allocated memory each time a program ran.
Electric Fence is the first known example of an Open Source program
cited as prior art in a patent application. It's listed in two AT&T
patents,
5,559,980
and
6,832,302
.
Alan Robertson, one of the co-inventors, told me that I killed two
patent claims that AT&T would otherwise have filed.
When HP customers
started running Electric Fence on the HP-UX system, they filed
so many bug reports on HP's own C library that HP had to do an
unscheduled software release to repair the issues.
For years,
programmers would email me "thank you" notes regarding the bugs that
Electric Fence found.
-
Busybox
-
I created
Busybox,
the embedded systems toolkit for Linux. It's now in millions of
wireless access points, cell phones, set-top boxes, etc.
-
HP
-
In 2000, I was hired as HP's senior global strategist for Linux
and Open Source, a position equivalent to section manager. I
was the only HP employee, other than Carly Fiorina, allowed
to speak my own opinions to the press. Unfortunately, the HP-Compaq
merger happened, and the Compaq side of the company won management
of Linux at that time.
-
Book Series
-
I was series editor of the
Bruce Perens' Open Source Series
of books with Prentice Hall PTR. 24 titles were published, all
with Open Source licenses on the text, long before the advent of
"Creative Commons". Only one title of the 24 failed to make money.
-
Organizations Founded
-
-
Linux Standard Base:
founder.
The standards organization of Linux,
later evolved into the
Linux Foundation.
-
Software in the Public Interest,
co-founder.
Debian's 501(c)3 non-profit foundation, today also supports a
number of other Open Source projects.
-
Open Source Initiative:
co-founder.
-
No-Code International:
founder.
Employment
-
Perens LLC: 2008-current
-
Paid public speaker, strategic consultant for large companies
developing products that incorporate
Open Source.
Customers:
Continental Automotive, Siemens, Symbian,
Open Source Automation Development Lab.
-
University of Agder: 2005-current
-
Visiting lecturer. Funded as a three-year grant by
the
Competence Fund of Southern Norway
.
Part-time position while I was also employed by Sourcelabs and
then Perens LLC.
Keynoted conferences, participated in Norwegian Government
policy development, taught students, performed research, was
consultant for an EU grant project: European Internet Accessibility
Laboratory.
I visited Norway several times a year, and brought my family
there for two summers. The rest of the work was performed
remotely from Berkeley.
Supervisor:
Dr. Mikael Snaprud,
Email: mikael at uia.no .
-
Sourcelabs: 2005-2007
-
Vice President. This was a half-time position, as I wanted to have
some additional time at home while my son was growing up, and also
wanted time to participate in outside Open Source projects and
issues. The company is now defunct, supervisor was Byron Sebastian.
Customers:
Merrill Lynch and TIAA.
-
Perens LLC: 2002-2005
-
Strategic consultant, expert witness and paid public speaker.
Customers:
NTT Docomo, Sealaska, Fluke Electronics.
-
Hewlett-Packard Corporation: 2000-2002
-
Senior global strategist for Linux and Open Source.
Policy making, strategic consultation to internal departments making
use of Open Source in products, company representative to press and
public.
-
Linux Capital Group: 1999-2000
-
CEO of business incubator. Created Progeny Linux Systems and hired
its CEO. The company held on for 8 years but unfortunately is now
defunct.
-
Pixar Animation Studios: 1987-1999
-
Senior Systems Programmer, producing studio tools for film
animation. Wrote kernel drivers, designed computer languages and
2-D imaging framework. Chief systems programmer for "Pixar II",
a SIMD image computer. Wrote hardware diagnostics, microcode,
gate-array simulation,
SCSI target adapter. Chief software engineer and later project
leader for ICEMAN computer language, under a grant from ARPA.
-
Matrix Instruments: 1986
-
Project manager for medical computer graphic laser film recorder
development. Responsible for a division in Orangeburg, NY and an
acquired company in Torrance, CA.
-
NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory: 1981-1986
Senior systems programmer. This laboratory was the predecessor
of Pixar, most of Pixar's founders and principal scientists worked
there, or had worked there.
Volunteer Work
Participating in an amicus curiæ (friend of the court) filing in a
current court case, pro bono publico (for the public good - without pay).
Speeches, software development work, PR and publicity, and policy
making for the Open Source developer community.
Other
- Family
-
This is what I really should have put at the top of the resume, because
it's most important: I'm a father and a husband. My wife and I have
a wonderful 8-year-old boy.
I've made sure I've been at home a lot while my son is growing up.
- Hobbies
-
Ham radio, travel, skiing, bicycling, hiking,
flat-water kayaking, white water rafting (former guide).