CITRIS Distinguished Speaker: Bruce Perens

Emphases	Services Science and Technology
Campuses	UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz

September 17, 2007: 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: 306 Soda Hall, HP Auditorium, UC Berkeley

Innovation Goes Public

Presented by Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source initiative in software.

Watch this talk online.

Abstract:

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, but 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 will show how Open Source is often the most effective strategy for creating and utilizing new innovation. He will explain the economics of Open Source and how it works for profit-generating companies. His talk will be clear to beginners yet informative even for Open Source pros.

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Biography:

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 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 Agder University 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, 12 of them at Pixar Animation Studios. He has a credit on the films A Bug's Life and Toy Story II.