Biography / Resume of Bruce Perens

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 a software company owner, an operating systems kernel programmer, a paid public speaker, a strategic consultant to major corporations, a well-published writer, an expert witness, 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 the films 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 four 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, because the most important and creative work goes on at those intersections. I enjoy working with top management, attorneys, 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:

Wikipedia has an article about me.
Videos of me that other people have posted on YouTube - many of which have accumulated hundreds or thousands of views. Also here .
The Internet Film Database covers some of the films I've worked on, and one of the documentaries where I'm featured.
Silicon.com's Top 50 Agenda-Setters. I made the list in '06 and '07 but not since '08, I'd better work harder.
Amazon.com finds books in which I'm mentioned.
Google . I also come up astonishingly high in Google searches for just "Bruce" . About number 12 to 14 at this writing.

Competence

Management: Management of software development, management of corporate line strategy, corporate policy development, small company CEO and CTO, 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: Teacher of continuing legal education classes to attorneys. 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.

Law

I testified in Jacobsen v. Katzer, an important case, in 2009. My testimony is here.

For the past two years and continuing this year, I teach an annual continuing legal education class to attorneys and keynote the associated conference Open Source and Security.

I consult for many law firms and corporate law departments, notably Greenberg Traurig, Qualcom, Broadcom, Continental Automotive.

Academia

I was a visiting lecturer with the University of Agder (Norway) for from 2006-2008, under a grant from the Competence Fund of Southern Norway. In 2009 I taught a summer session to Ph.D. students, and I will return there to lecture in 2011.
I was senior scientist for Open Source with the Cyber Security Policy Research Laboratory of George Washington University.

Government

Most recently, I participated in a 2009 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 was on the advisory board of Norwegian Open Source Center .
I have been on the advisory board of Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C. organization that promtes reform in IT laws and government policy.
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 leader of the Debian Open Source Linux distribution, 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. It has since been cited in 7,836,434 filed by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle.
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. I have never been involved in the lawsuits brought by later Busybox developers.

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

Active Agenda LLC: 2010-current: Director on the executive board and part owner. This start-up company provides software for the management of operational risk. Currently leading their transition to a software-as-a-service business.
Perens LLC: 2008-current: Strategic consultant for large companies developing products that incorporate Open Source, consultant to law firms, paid public speaker. Some Notable Customers: National Government of Norway, Lexis-Nexis division of Elsevier, Qualcom, Broadcom, Unisys, Greenberg Traurig Law Firm, Continental Automotive, Siemens, Symbian
University of Agder: 2005-2009 and present: 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

Volunteer Work

Volunteer for AMSAT , the first private space program: Creating and evangelizing technical initiatives. Assisting counsel in the development of legal structures for Open Source and Open Hardware.

Participated in an amicus curiæ (friend of the court) filing in a notable court case, pro bono publico (for the public good - without pay).

Speaking and writing on Open Source and Open Hardware.

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).