Perens was vice president at Sourcelabs from 1995 to 1997.
Perens was series editor of the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books with Prentice Hall PTR publishers, which published 24 titles. Perens spent two years with HP as Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source, and was president of Linux Capital Group, a venture fund that specialized in Linux. Perens spent 20 years in the computer graphic animation industry, 12 of them at Pixar Animation Studios He has a credit on the films A Bug's Life and Toy Story II.