Project Manager Software

Who is Bruce Perens?

Biography / Resume

Biography / Resume of Bruce Perens

*****@******.***

Phone: 1-510-***-****

PMB 549 (this is a mailbox store, you won't find me there)

**** ****no 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.

that other people have posted on YouTube - many of which have

accumulated hundreds or thousands of views. Also

.

The

covers some of the films I've worked on, and one of the documentaries where I'm featured.

Silicon.com's

I made the list in '06 and '07 but not since '08,

I'd better work harder.

finds books in which I'm mentioned.

.

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

(Ogg Theora format, may require installation of a plug-in).

Pixar Films

In 1981, I joined the,

which was the predecessor of

.

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,

the manifesto of the Open Source movement in software and definition

of its software licensing rules, as a policy document for

About 8 months later, Eric Raymond and I founded the

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

we helped create.

Law

I testified in Jacobsen v. Katzer, an important case, in 2009.

My testimony is .

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

(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

of George Washington University.

Government

Most recently, I participated in a 2009

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

.

I have been on the advisory board of

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

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

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

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

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,

and

.

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

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 FoundedLinux Standard Base:

founder.

The standards organization of Linux,

later evolved into the

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.

EmploymentActive 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

.

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

Volunteer for, 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.

OtherFamily

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).

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