February 27, 2001, 5:07 PM — Bruce Perens is ubiquitous. At least, it's sometimes seemed that way; he's known to computing specialists as the primary author of the open source definition, the former project leader for Debian, a senior programmer with Pixar, the creator of Electric Fence, and a prolific advocate of GNU/Linux and related open source matters. At the end of 2000, Hewlett-Packard hired him as a "strategic advisor." Last month, we interviewed him in ITworld.com's Interviews forum, where you can read the complete text of this interview. Here are the highlights.
Opening salvos
LinuxWorld.com: Sounds nice, Bruce: "strategic advisor." Does that mean we're free to think dark thoughts about you personally the next time HP releases hardware with Windows drivers, but none for Linux?
Bruce Perens: About HP hardware: it's going to take more than a month on the job to change the policies for design-in decisions over a company of 81,000 people. I'm currently dealing with printers (with some success on existing lines and good hope for future models) and have yet to have a chat with the notebook folks about Winmodems. Management has bought into operating system independence.
While you are thinking I'm ubiquitous, don't forget that I'm also founder of No-Code International, the organization that has lobbied to remove the Morse code examination for ham radio licensing.
LinuxWorld.com: Funny you should mention No-Code International; although you don't know it, that is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about you. I'm always a bit tentative about straying away from narrowly technical subjects in these interviews, because I assume folks want to manage their own privacy. While we're roaming around, what happened to Technocrat.net? And how is Stanley doing? [See Resources for links to both.] Is it in your plans to crank computing down to less than a full-time part of your life?
Bruce Perens: Stanley is 8 months old now, and is a very happy and healthy little kid. I really should put up more photos of him -- it's another thing I've not had time to do. Being a parent of a child this young is really a full-time job for two people (and Valerie gets too much of the load).
I finally shut Technocrat down this morning, actually. It just wasn't getting the traffic, and I didn't have time to do it justice.
Opening HP
LinuxWorld.com: You're working with printers now ("with some success") and aim to move on to notebooks in the future. What's that mean at a technical or daily-life level? What do you do that helps get source code for drivers out to the public, and why wasn't the job getting done before you arrived?
Bruce Perens: Actually, people were at work getting the printer drivers out before I showed up -- I can't claim to have originated anything there, although I've had some influence on policy.
The biggest problem is the technology they have licensed. Sometimes, they've licensed both intellectual property in the printer and in the host at the driver level from the same company, and the protocol used over the printer port is someone else's proprietary property. In an internal meeting, I joked that we couldn't move the print head (in our own printers) without an NDA. Sorting that out is a hassle. I don't think any new printers are going to be designed that way, thank goodness, but of course I'd like to get the current ones supported.
LinuxWorld.com: I can imagine how stinging that crack was. So what can you do about restrictive licenses? Are you the one "sorting that out"? I'll push you again to answer: what do you do on a daily basis within HP?
Bruce Perens: Today I am:
-Helping the Linux printer driver product manager sort out some troublesome patent issues
-Reading strategy documents and commenting on them
-Planning a "coffee talk" about Linux inside of HP
-Following up on some issues for Linux on Intel 64-bit architecture
-Writing my talk for LinuxWorld on stack-smashing security attacks
Tomorrow, I will:
-Make the once-a-week-or-so drive to HP Cupertino (it's about 1.5 hours from Berkeley)
-Meet with one of the HP vice presidents about Linux
-Meet with a very large company about partnering on a Linux product
-Visit the founder of a Linux distribution at his home
