Christopher Sean Morrison

Last modified by sean on 2016/04/05 11:27

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Elected to the board, my main goal is to expand open source within government and academia by cultivating the social and legal constructs necessary for those domains to thrive.  I offer a deep passion for open source, hands-on experience, and fresh perspective.

Promoting Non-Commercial Open Source

I'm a federal government research scientist with more than 20 years experience working with governments, academia, and commercial industry.  Most people know me as Sean and the guy behind BRL-CAD.  In 1998, I began a 5+ year journey navigating details of open source licensing, international copyright issues, US federal regulations, and government politics to get one of the world's oldest software codes released as open source.  I have particularly extensive background managing and promoting open source in international contexts.  Elected to the board, I will leverage my experience to help expand the adoption of open source by academia and federal, state, and local agencies around the world.

        I believe there is exceptional and untapped opportunity for promoting open source in the public service sectors.

Of Developers, By Developers

As a supporter of meritocratic processes and choosing to lead by example, I'm an avid contributor to a number of notable open source projects including BRL-CAD, BZFlag, Haiku, FreeBSD, RTEMS, and others.  I've authored articles for the Open Source Business Resource, given technical talks to the U.S. National Research Council, and promote open source at every opportunity.  My primary areas of expertise and research include open source strategy, project management, software development, code hardening, and licensing.  Ohloh stats indicate I've made at least 17k commits to open source, ranking my activity in the top 0.1% of all open source developers.

        I believe that hands-on experience with open source cultivates superior leadership and better understanding.

Moving the Open Source Initiative Forward

The OSI needs fresh perspective.  By specifically targeting the single largest producer and consumer of software on the planet -- the US federal government -- I will push for an agenda that expands open source adoption by non-commercial players (i.e., government and academia).  Government software in particular should be open source by default, not by exception.  There are lots of smart and well-connected people affiliated with OSI that want this, but I don't see the energy, sense of community, or focus.  There was outstanding noise made a few years ago to rally folks at the first ever OSI community summit in D.C., but there wasn't follow-through or endurance.  OSI needs someone to champion the agenda, to be an ambassador that understands the complex issues, to keep moving discussions forward.  

        I believe we can radically change the open source landscape by focusing attention where open source has the most growth potential.


$ cat ~/whoami

Christopher Sean Morrison has been involved with open source since the 80's, long before the term was coined and OSI established.  He has been an outspoken advocate since 2001, having experienced first-hand the power of open source community when he started working on BZFlag.  He has a B.S. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, is pursuing a masters, and is an active professional member and supporter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), International Game Developers Association (IGDA), and Solid Modeling Association (SMA).  He is actively involved within the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) community and a number of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educational programs.  He grew up and has lived around the world, speaks multiple languages fluently, and is proficient in 20+ programming languages.  He is a single malt Scotch zealot, a rower (crew), a coach (crew and STEM), a culinarian, a classical guitarist, a woodworker, and a dad.

The best way to get in touch is by sending a message to 'brlcad' on the Freenode IRC network or send e-mail to morrison at brlcad dot org.

IRC | LinkedIn | Ohloh

Cheers!