About

Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is a leader in the Open Source community. He created the Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. Together with Eric S. Raymond he co-founded the Open Source Initiative. In 2005, he represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the invitation of the United Nations Development Program.

Today, Perens is still active in representing open source to the world and advising several national governments and multinational corporations regarding Open Source. In 2007 some of his government advisory roles included: a meeting with the President of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of parliament) 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 (Perens is on the advisory board of the center); he provided input on the revision of the European Interoperability Framework; was keynote speaker at a European Commission conference on Digital Business Ecosystems. at the Centre Borschette, Brussels, on November 7.

Perens poses Open Source as a means of marketing the free software philosophy of Richard Stallman to business people who are more concerned with profit than freedom, and claims that open source and free software are only two ways of talking about the same phenomenon. This differs from Stallman and Raymond. Perens postulates 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 time.

Perens is a former Debian Project Leader, a founder of Software in the Public Interest, founder and first project leader of the Linux Standard Base project, the initial author of BusyBox, and founder of the UserLinux project. Perens also has a book series with Prentice Hall PTR called the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series. He is an avid amateur radio enthusiast (callsign K6BP) and maintains technocrat.net, which he styles 'a more mature forum than Slashdot. He is also the founder of No Code International which is an organization whose primary purpose was to eliminate morse code proficiency as a requirement to obtain an amateur radio license. This goal has been reached with the new "code-free" rules introduced on 2007-02-23. Perens left OSI a year after co-founding it, with reasons explained in an email titled "It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again". In February 2008, for the 10th anniversary of the Open Source, Perens has published an interesting message to the community called State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source. For the same event, the 10th anniversary of Open Source, the ezine RegDeveloper has published an interesting interview with Bruce Perens where he revives an updated view on the past and the future, and the dangers of the Open Source, especially the useless proliferation of OSI approved licenses and the strength of the GPL 3. In addition, the interview covers Linus' refusal to adopt the GPLv3 for the Linux kernel.