Russ Nelson

For other people with the same name, see Russell Nelson (disambiguation).
"Crynwr" redirects here. For the Quakers, see Crynwyr.
Russ Nelson
Russ Nelson in 2005
Board of Directors, Open Source Initiative
In office
February 1998 – April 6, 2011
Succeeded by Jim Jagielski
President, Open Source Initiative
In office
February 1, 2005 – February 23, 2005
Preceded by Eric S. Raymond
Succeeded by Michael Tiemann
Personal details
Born March 21, 1958
Political party Libertarian Party
Occupation Software developer
Known for Board member and former president of Open Source Initiative
Website http://russnelson.com/

Russell Nelson (born March 21, 1958) is an American computer programmer. He was a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative and briefly served as its president in 2005.

Career

In 1983, Nelson and Patrick Naughton wrote Painter's Apprentice, a MacPaint clone. Nelson was the author of Freemacs (a variant of Emacs used by FreeDOS).

While attending university, Nelson began developing the collection of drivers later commercially released as the "Crynwr Collection". In 1991, Nelson founded Crynwr Software, a company located in Potsdam, New York, supporting deployment of large-scale e-mail systems, development of packet drivers, Linux kernel drivers, and reverse engineering of embedded systems.

In July 2010, Nelson was working on water quality sensors.

Open Source Initiative

In 1998, Nelson became one of the six first members of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative.

On February 1, 2005, he was named as the new president of the Open Source Initiative, replacing Eric S. Raymond. On February 7, Nelson published a post to his personal blog titled "Blacks are lazy", which generated controversy. Nelson apologized to those who perceived the post (which he withdrew because it "was not well written") as racist. Nelson resigned as president in early March (the resignation was backdated to February 23), and stated he did not believe himself to be politically savvy enough for the role of president.

Nelson remained on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative for another six years.

Personal

Nelson is the son of Russell Edward Nelson and Gladys Jacobsen Nelson. Formerly a Quaker, for political reasons he no longer identifies as one, as of 2014. Nelson is a pacifist, and a member of the Libertarian Party of the United States.

Nelson created the first Quaker website in the world, quaker.org, in early 1995. He transferred the website to Friends Publishing Corporation, a Quaker nonprofit, in March 2018.