Karl Fogel

Books and Articles

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project

Book, 272 pages, published 2005, O'Reilly Media, ISBN 0-596-00759-0.
Also online under an open copyright: http://www.producingoss.com/

Open Source Development With CVS

Book, 315 pages, published 1999, Coriolis, ISBN 1-57610-490-7.
Also online under an open copyright: http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/
(Now in 3rd edition, as revised by Moshe Bar.)

Teams and Tools

Chapter 21 of the book Beautiful Teams (O'Reilly Media, 2009, ISBN 0-596-51802-1 / 9780596518028).
Also online under an open copyright.

Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology

Chapter 2 of the book Beautiful Code (O'Reilly Media, 2007, ISBN 0-596-51004-7).
Also online under an open copyright.

The Promise of a Post-Copyright World

An article about expanding open source principles beyond the software field.
Online under an open copyright.

What is Free Software?

An article at O'ReillyNet that explains free software to the general reader.
Online under an open copyright.

Why Audio Format Matters

An article about audio formats and software patents, written for the Free Software Foundation.
Online under an open copyright.

Linux Bible (two chapters)

Wrote the chapters on Emacs and shell customization in the Linux User's Guide, later published in the Linux Bible from Yggdrasil Computing, ISBN 1-88360-10-X.

Experience

Canonical, Ltd   Dec 2008 - present

Launchpad Ombudsman.

QuestionCopyright.org   Feb 2007 - present

Director and editor (part-time, non-profit).

Independent consulting   Jan 2007 - Dec 2009

Independent consulting on the Subversion version control system and on open source processes.

Google, Inc   May 2006 - Oct 2006

Open Source Program Specialist. Open source training and education, helping open source internal code, helping fund open source organizations. Resigned due to long commute; parted on amicable terms and happy to provide references.

CollabNet, Inc   Feb 2000 - Apr 2006

Managed creation and development of Subversion, an open source version control system.

onShore, Inc   Dec 1997 - Jan 2000

Programmer, release manager, resident CVS guru.

Yunnan University, Kunming, PR China   Sep 1996 - Jul 1997

Taught English and general computing at the undergraduate level: Unix system administration, user-level applications, C programming.

Cyclic Software   May 1995 - Jan 1996

Co-founder and General Partner, with Jim Blandy; business included selling CVS technical support and custom development. Ported CVS client to OS/2, implemented password-authenticating server and read-only repository access. We sold Cyclic Software to Jim Kingdon in early 1996.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   Jan 1994 - May 1995

Programmer in the microbiology department, laboratory of Carl Woese. Developed a gene sequence alignment editor (ALE) for microbiologists at UIUC and the University of Indiana.

Projects

Subversion  (http://subversion.apache.org/)

Founding committer and long-time developer; no longer coding but still active in community meta-development.

GNU Emacs  (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html)

Committer, maintaining three packages in core distribution: bookmark.el, mail-hist.el, and saveplace.el.

QuestionCopyright.org  (http://www.questioncopyright.org/)

Founder and editor.

Launchpad  (https://launchpad.net/)

Developer, sometime ombudsman.

CVS  (http://cvs.nongnu.org/)

Former co-maintainer and committer, implemented anonymous read-only repository access feature in 1997; no longer active.

cvs2svn  (http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/)

Former co-maintainer, still a committer but no longer active.

cvs2cl  (http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/)

Original author, still technically a committer, but handed off primary maintenance long ago.

(For detailed open source activity, see my account at the aggregator ohloh.net.)

Programming Languages and Environments

C, Lisp/Scheme, Python, Perl, SQL, Bourne shell, Emacs, Unix, X Windows, XML, HTML, CSS, SVN, CVS, XQR.

Awards

2007 Google–O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Community Builder.

2006 Jolt Productivity Award for the book Producing Open Source Software.

Education

B.A. Oberlin College, 1994. East Asian Studies major, Chinese language concentration.