Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens is an American venture capitalist, computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric S. Raymond. Today, he is a partner at OSS Capital.
In 2005, Perens represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the invitation of the United Nations Development Programme. He has appeared before national legislatures and is often quoted in the press, advocating for open source and the reform of national and international technology policy.
Perens is also an amateur radio operator, with call sign K6BP. He promotes open radio communications standards and open-source hardware.
In 2016 Perens, along with Boalt Hall professor Lothar Determann, co-authored "Open Cars" which appeared in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal.
In 2018 Perens founded the Open Research Institute, a non-profit research and development organization to address technologies involving Open Source, Open Hardware, Open Standards, Open Content, and Open Access to Research. ORI facilitate worldwide collaboration in the development of technology that would otherwise be restricted under national laws like ITAR and EAR.
Companies
Perens is a partner at OSS Capital, and continues to operate two companies: Algoram is a start-up which is creating a software-defined radio transceiver. Legal Engineering is a legal-technical consultancy which specializes in resolving copyright infringement in relation to open source software.Early life
Perens grew up in Long Island, New York. He was born with cerebral palsy, which caused him to have slurred speech as a child, a condition that led to a misdiagnosis of him as developmentally disabled in school and led the school to fail to teach him to read. He developed an interest in technology at an early age: besides his interest in amateur radio, he ran a pirate radio station in the town of Lido Beach and briefly engaged in phone phreaking.Career
Computer graphics
Perens worked for seven years at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. After that, he worked at Pixar for 12 years, from 1987 to 1999. He is credited as a studio tools engineer on the Pixar films A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2.No-Code International
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an amateur radio license. His rationale was that amateur radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.Perens lobbied intensively on the Internet, at amateur radio events in the United States, and during visits to other nations. One of his visits was to Iceland, where he had half of that nation's radio amateurs in the room, and their vote in the International Amateur Radio Union was equivalent to that of the entire United States.
BusyBox
In 1995, Perens created BusyBox, a package of Unix-style utilities for operating systems including Linux-based ones and FreeBSD. He stopped working on it in 1996, after which it was taken over by other developers.Starting in 2007, several lawsuits were filed for infringement of BusyBox copyright and licensing. These lawsuits were filed by the Software Freedom Law Center, and some of the later managing developers of BusyBox.
In 2009, Bruce Perens released a statement about the lawsuits and those filing them. In it, he claims that he maintains a significant or even majority ownership of the software in the litigation, but was not contacted nor represented by the plaintiffs; and that some of the plaintiffs had themselves modified BusyBox and its distribution package in such a way as to violate applicable licensing terms and copyright owned by Perens and additional BusyBox developers. Perens supports enforcement of the GPL license used on Busybox. Because he was denied participation in the Busybox cases on the side of the plaintiffs, Perens started a consulting business to assist the defendants in coming into compliance with the GPL and arriving at an amicable settlement with the Software Freedom Law Center.
Debian Project Leader
From April 1996 to December 1997, while still working at Pixar, Perens served as Debian Project Leader, the person who coordinates development of the Debian open source operating system. He replaced Ian Murdock, the creator of Debian, who had been the first project leader.Software in the Public Interest
In 1997, Perens was a co-founder of Software in the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization intended to serve as an umbrella organization to aid open-source software and hardware projects. It was originally created to allow the Debian Project to accept donations.Debian Social Contract
In 1997, Perens carbon-copied an email conversation between Donnie Barnes of Red Hat and Ean Schuessler, who was then working on Debian. Schuessler bemoaned that Red Hat had never stated its social contract with the developer community. Perens took this as inspiration to create a formal social contract for Debian. In a blog posting, Perens claims not to have made use of the Three Freedoms published by the Free Software Foundation in composing his document. Perens proposed a draft of the Debian Social Contract to the Debian developers on the debian-private mailing list early in June 1997. Debian developers contributed discussion and changes for the rest of the month while Perens edited, and the completed document was then announced as Debian project policy. Part of the Debian Social Contract was the Debian Free Software Guidelines, a set of 10 guidelines for determining whether a set of software can be described as "free software", and thus whether it could be included in Debian.Linux Capital Group
In 1999, Perens left Pixar and became the president of Linux Capital Group, a business incubator and venture capital firm focusing on Linux-based businesses. Their major investment was in Progeny Linux Systems, a company headed by Debian founder Ian Murdock. In 2000, as a result of the economic downturn, Perens shut down Linux Capital Group.Hewlett-Packard
From December 2000 to September 2002, Perens served as "Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source" at Hewlett-Packard, internally evangelizing for the use of Linux and other open-source software. He was fired as a result of his anti-Microsoft statements, which especially became an issue after HP acquired Compaq, a major manufacturer of Microsoft Windows-based PCs, in 2002.Linux Standard Base
In 1998, Perens founded, and became the first project leader, of the Linux Standard Base project, a joint project by several Linux distributions now under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the Linux software system structure.UserLinux
In 2003 Perens created UserLinux, a Debian-based distribution whose stated goal was, "Provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options designed to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall costs." UserLinux was eventually overtaken in popularity by Ubuntu, another Debian-based distribution, which was started in 2004, and UserLinux became unmaintained in 2006.University faculty
Between 1981 and 1986, Perens was on the staff of the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab as a Unix kernel programmer.In 2002, Perens was a remote Senior Scientist for Open Source with the Cyber Security Policy Laboratory of George Washington University under the direction of Tony Stanco. Stanco was director of the laboratory for a year, while its regular director was on sabbatical.
Between 2006 and 2007, Perens was a visiting lecturer and researcher for the University of Agder under a three-year grant from the Competence Fund of Southern Norway. During this time he consulted the Norwegian Government and other entities on government policy issues related to computers and software. After this time Perens worked remotely on Agder programs, mainly concerning the European Internet Accessibility Observatory.
Other activities
In 2007, some of Perens's government advisory roles included a meeting with the President of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy and testimony to the Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies; a keynote speech at the foundation of Norway's Open Source Center, following Norway's Minister of Governmental Reform ; he provided input on the revision of the European Interoperability Framework; and he was keynote speaker at a European Commission conference on Digital Business Ecosystems at the Centre Borschette, Brussels, on November 7.In 2009, Perens acted as an expert witness on open source in the Jacobsen v. Katzer U.S. Federal lawsuit. His report, which was made publicly available by Jacobsen, presented the culture and impact of open-source software development to the federal courts.
Perens delivered one of the keynote addresses at the 2012 linux.conf.au conference in Ballarat, Australia. He discussed the need for open source software to market itself better to non-technical users. He also discussed some of the latest developments in open-source hardware, such as Papilio and Bus Pirate.
In 2013, Perens spoke in South America, as the closing keynote at Latinoware 2013. He was the keynote of CISL – Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and keynoted a special event along with the Minister of software and innovation of Chubut Province, in Puerto Madrin, Patagonia, Argentina. He keynoted the Festival de Software Libre 2013, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
In 2014–2015, Perens took a break from Open Source conferences, having spoken at them often since 1996. In 2016, he returned to the conference circuit, keynoting the Open Source Insight conference in Seoul, sponsored by the Copyright Commission of South Korea. Perens web site presently advertises his availability to keynote conferences as long as travel and lodging expenses are compensated.
Views
Perens poses "Open Source" as a means of marketing the free and open-source software idea to business people and mainstream who might be more interested in the practical benefits of an open source development model and ecosystem than abstract ethics. He states that open source and free software are only two ways of talking about the same phenomenon, a point of view not shared by Stallman and his free software movement. Perens postulated in 2004 an economic theory for business use of Open Source in his paper The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source and his speech Innovation Goes Public. This differs from Raymond's theory in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which having been written before there was much business involvement in open source, explains open source as a consequence of programmer motivation and leisure.In February 2008, for the 10th anniversary of the phrase "open source", Perens published a message to the community called "State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source". Around the same time the ezine RegDeveloper published an interview with Perens where he spoke of the successes of open source, but also warned of dangers, including a proliferation of OSI-approved licenses which had not undergone legal scrutiny. He advocated the use of the GPLv3 license, especially noting Linus Torvalds' refusal to switch away from GPLv2 for the Linux kernel.
Bruce Perens supported Bernie Sanders for President and he claims that his experience with the open source movement influenced that decision. On July 13, 2016, following Sanders's endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, Perens endorsed Clinton.
Amateur radio and other activities
Perens is an avid amateur radio enthusiast and maintained technocrat.net, which he closed in late 2008, because its revenues did not cover its costs.Media appearances
Perens is featured in the 2001 documentary film Revolution OS and the 2006 BBC television documentary The Code-Breakers.From 2002 to 2006, Prentice Hall PTR published the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, a set of 24 books covering various open source software tools, for which Perens served as the series editor. It was the first book series to be published under an open license.