HFOSS - Interview with Bruce Perens

And the last of the interviews is to Bruce Perens who is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source community. He is creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. He’s founder or co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, The Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International.

You can either watch the video interview or read over the answers



This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

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What's the big picture opportunity in connecting education and open source?

• Bruce believes that the biggest opportunity is for 3rd world countries and people with low funds, which can be said of many U.S. schools
• Bruce mentions that open-source can benefit many schools since it gives control to the school and the ability to modify the software to meet their needs
  
• He explains how at some point he realized that he was not getting the value he wanted from paid products and he joined the open-source community

What specific projects or courses are you working on that make the link between open source and education?

• Education and open-source projects are linked if they do give power to them
• He has been teaching how to use open-source with radio broadcasting
• At a Norwegian university were he worked, he helped build a lab for really low cost by using GNU Radio
• School all around the globe could have graduate level courses since they would not have to do large investments to set up a lab
• Open-source projects can give a lot of power and capabilities to people that they did not have before

Do you have any advice on how Mozilla could best engage with educators and students?

• Bruce suggests that Mozilla could have their experienced developers appear in school's classes and that would be of great use for both educators and students
  

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