Contents 

Bruce Perens
Talk
Panel Discussion
Media  

Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source community.  He advises large corporations and several national governments on Open Source policy.  He is the creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. Perens is a vice president at SourceLabs, a venture-funded company that provides Open Source services to Wall Street.  He is a visiting researcher at the University of Agder in Norway, funded by a national grant.  He was HP's first Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source and was Senior Research Scientist for Open Source with George Washington University's Cyber Security Policy Research Institute.  The Bruce Perens' Open Source Series from Prentice Hall published 24 titles with Perens as series editor.  Perens previously spent 20 years in the computer graphic animation industry, twelve of them at Pixar Animation Studios. He has a credit on the films A Bug's Life and Toy Story II.

Talk

Open Source provides much of the software infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies and organizations:  Merrill Lynch, Google, Pixar, Amazon, the City of New York and probably you - although you might not know it.  Innovative products like Linux, Firefox and Apache are the market-leaders in their sectors.  There are tens of thousands of Open Source programs used for just about everything!  But the economics of Open Source are non-intuitive:  How can you make money by giving software away?  Why did IBM de-emphasize AIX, after spending billions, in favor of Linux, the product of a loose collaboration of programmers that it can never control?  How can the world's greatest city trust Open Source to help manage its jails?

Perens talk showed us how Open Source is often the most effective strategy for creating and utilizing new innovation. He explained the economics of Open Source and how it works for profit-generating companies.

This talk took place on Friday, April 4th, 2008.

Panel Discussion

Bruce Perens was also a panelist in the Flourish 2008 Panel Discussion. More information can be found on the Flourish 2008 Panel Discussion main page.

Media

Embedded video of Innovation Goes Public:

Downloads for Innovation Goes Public:

• Xvid Video (AVI) (413 MiB)
• Presentation Slides (ZIP) (57.8 KiB)

Photos:

• Bruce Perens
• Innovation Goes Public Talk
• Panel Discussion