'Anonymous' funds patent foe

Bruce Perens has found what every open-source activist needs: a sugar daddy.

A sponsor has provided Perens with a $50,000 annuity to support his advocacy for open-source organizations and his opposition to the software patents that he says are stymieing industry standards on which open-source groups depend.

"I'm very concerned about software patents," Perens said. "They remain a blocker for open-source software. It's really difficult for us to coexist with them, and what we're trying to do right now is mitigate the problem in the standards arena by encouraging standards organizations to engineer standards that are royalty-free."

The donor has chosen to remain anonymous, and Perens--who until last September was on Hewlett-Packard's payroll--would not say whether it was a company, a nonprofit group or an individual.

"I've been working the past two years on this issue, sometimes with very generous support from HP," Perens said. "But it became kind of a problem for HP, because I would say things for open source that would be very embarrassing to the company. I need to be able to say what I want to say, and thus people who send me money may prefer not to have their names associated with the donation."

Perens is a Linux developer who co-founded the Open Source Initiative, founded a group called Software in the Public Interest, and helped develop the Debian version of Linux. Following HP's acquisition of Compaq Computer, Perens found himself with a pink slip.

View: Full article