Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and an advocate in the free software movement, who created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source, and who co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric S. Raymond. In 1997 he drafted the Debian Social Contract, whose Debian Free Software Guidelines he modified into the Open Source Definition in February 1998; he left the Open Source Initiative a year later. He grew up on Long Island, New York, was a Unix kernel programmer at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, and worked at Pixar for 12 years from 1987 to 1999, where he is credited as a studio tools engineer on A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2. He later led the Linux Capital Group, served as Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, created the Debian-based UserLinux distribution in 2003, and founded the Open Research Institute in 2018.