Bruce Perens

I am running for one of the Individual seats.

About Me

I am one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and was an initial board member 20 years ago. I was the creator of the Open Source Definition, the rules for Open Source licensing which OSI still uses. I published my first Open Source program, the Electric Fence malloc debugger, to the USENET newsgroup comp.sources.sun from Pixar in the late 1980's. So, I've been participating in Open Source for about 30 years now - half my life.

I continue to tour the world promoting Open Source software, keynoting many conferences.  At home, I'm working on Open Source for Space as president of Open Research Institute, Inc. (ORI), a non-profit organization which supports international collaboration on Open Source projects for technology that would otherwise be considered "munitions" by the U.S. Government under ITAR and EAR. ORI will apply to become an affiliate of OSI once we're certified as a 501(c)3 non-profit. To support my family, I run a small business, Legal Engineering, which helps law firms and their customers to understand Open Source and to resolve license compliance issues.

I was the second Debian project leader and successfully split the development of the "core" of Debian among many different developers worldwide instead of a single developer. At the time, nobody knew that you could do that and have the system actually run when it all came together. We succeeded in getting the Debian system on two Space Shuttle flights, and built not just Debian but the foundation of all of its derivatives today: Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

I created Busybox, a set of tiny command-line utilities for the first compact embedded Linux system, as part of the Debian installer. Today, it's in your phone, drone, and wireless access point.

I published 24 books on Open Source software as series editor of the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books with Prentice Hall PTR publishers. This was the first book series under an Open Publication License, before Creative Commons existed.

I continue to write Open Source, most recently some packages to help Ruby on Rails developers.

I am active as a member of OSI's license review committee, and helping OSI handle some gnarly political issues that threaten Open Source. I've had to do a lot of explaining this year about why Open Source is the way that it is, that OSI should be able to do for itself - for instance seriously explaining to companies, lawyers, and standards committees why Open Source doesn't have patent royalties, and why the license rules are the way they are. Things that are logical, but not obvious. Mostly to people outside of OSI, but even OSI, after several generations of leadership, has forgotten some history and doesn't always have the words that they need.

Why I'm Running

I've been very effective without holding any representative position. I'm going to go on doing this stuff whether you elect me or not. But I can do more, and more effectively, on some serious issues if you help me by making me an OSI director again. Let's break my agenda into two pieces:

1. We're Not Reaching the Common People - People worldwide run your software, but are unaware of its effect on their lives. We need to reach them, so that they understand that there's another path besides having devices that control the user rather than are controlled by them, and are tools for selling their attention and information about them. Can we meaningfully improve the life of the common person, by helping them to understand what's at stake? Personal devices and the Internet should be tools to enable humanity and increase our freedom, rather than being used to misinform, surveil, and subjugate us. Open Source is the only way to make that happen. But to do the work, we must transition from making tools mainly for ourselves to understanding how to engage the common person as well as, for example, Apple does. That's really difficult for our developers, but we have opportunities to teach them how to do it.

2. The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance - There are some serious problems facing the Open Source community, and there always are, every year. Who is pushing back for you? Maybe not who you think. We are faced with powerful companies and their industry associations that profess to represent Open Source while they work against our interest, like loggers who claim to speak for the trees. They try to establish royalty-bearing patents in "Open" standards that would prevent the implementation of Open Source that complied with the standard, or its commercial use. They are fighting to make our licenses unenforceable - one country's copyright commission even sponsored a presentation on making Open Source licenses "guidelines" rather than legal requirements. Well-known companies flaunt decade-long infringements of licenses that don't even ask for much, potentially establishing a precedent for courts to further dishonor our licenses. One company and their lawyer sued me for defamation for even daring to blog that they might be violating an Open Source license, running up a fortune in legal defense fees. I'm sticking with the case, to protect the Free Speech Rights of Open Source developers, and I'm blessed with the help of lawyers who stick with me so that I'll keep up the good fight. I'll make the plaintiff pay, eventually. But against all of these forces, we have our small, poorly funded organizations that truly have the community's goals at heart, and people like me who try to fund their activities out of their own pockets. We need all of the help you can get.

We Need to Have Fun, Too

A lot of Open Source is developed by people on their own time, and even the ones who get paid spend a lot of their personal energy, credibility, and their career direction on Open Source. We need to keep it fun for them, or they won't work. They need to be helped in whatever way they can be, their work needs to be made easier wherever we can, and they need to be appreciated for their work. We need companies to treat them well, not exploit them. So, I lobby and educate in their interest, and spend some time on stage giving them reasons to feel good about their work (like this: do you know just how much Open Source is on the Falcon 9? Actually a lot, and there's even Open Hardware!).

Engaging The Other Individual Candidates

I'm running for an individual seat. The candidates are all great people and I wish we had room for them all on the board. We do have room for everyone in OSI, so I hope the campaign and election don't dissuade them. So, this isn't about running against those people. Let's have a policy discussion.

Duane O'Brien thinks that Corporate Sponsors should be Corporate Donors, and puts up a good rationale. I agree.

Molly de Blanc (present board member) is looking for greater ethnic diversity. I agree, and I am unfortunately another old white guy. I can claim to be a religious minority in the U.S. (ethnically Jewish, Secular Humanist). There's also gender diversity. This year and last have been years of Woman Power for me. I am privileged to be partner of the inspiring Valerie Gilbert-Perens since the summer of '91, and with her parent of Stanley. Stanley is now 17 and a state-certified search-and-rescue and firefighting volunteer, working the Napa fire and Berkeley ambulance calls, and graduating high school with his EMT certificate. Most of my customers for Legal Engineering are woman corporate attorneys, and there is the amazing All Woman Defense Team (except for one lonely first-year associate) helping me with my lawsuit. A lot of my work over the past few months on Open Research Institute has been to develop an organization to support a woman who develops space communication systems, and when she's not doing that plays in the orchestra, and is a mom too! All of these women are amazing, and no man can claim they are less than him in any way.

A lot of the candidates statements say they want to increase membership and funding. OK, that's obviously good for most organizations, but what are we going to do with it? I'd encourage those folks to go back to their pages and write more about policy. There is a lot of it that we should be working upon.

Relationship of Open Source and Free Software

Open Source is standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement which he created. Richard deserves our honor. My intent in founding OSI was to promote the idea of Free Software to business people in a way that they would understand, in the hope that many of them would eventually develop sympathy to Richard's presentation. And many have! Open Source licenses and Free Software licenses don't have any fundamental differences. We're working for the same thing. Those who try to split our camps in two don't understand what we're about.