The Seattle, Washington-based company, which offers support services around a pre-integrated stack of open source software offerings, said Perens will continue to work as an open source advocate while at the company.
Perens is one of the most respected people in the open source movement and is the founder of the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Standard Base, and Software in the Public Interest organizations, as well as the former project leader of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, and the author of the Open Source Definition.
During a varied career in the software industry Perens has also been credited as a software engineer on the films A Bugs Life, and Toy Story II, run his own venture capital company, and served as senior strategist, Linux and open source, for Hewlett Packard between 2000 and 2002.
Since leaving HP, Perens has been working as a consultant with clients including IBM, Novell and Borland Software. He is also a director of open source intellectual property insurance firm Open Source Risk Management and a major stockholder in Progeny Linux Systems, a company he helped create during his VC days.
SourceLabs chief executive, Byron Sebastian, said that Perens would assist the company in bringing together the open source community and corporate IT community as the head of its developer relations program. Perens will also support the company’s ongoing R&D projects.
Perens himself praised SourceLabs’ focus on bringing multiple open source projects together, avoiding vendor lock-in and expensive integration efforts. The company’s first certified software stack, the AMP stack, includes the Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting engine, and was launched in March.
