Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
Yeah, I've been doing the same thinking for a while, although the 'falling asleep' reminder is a key one -- I'll likely start with one of those books and see how far I get with the boredom factor. Good advice all around.
Part of the attraction to me isn't as much the IANAL-but-act-like-one part, rather it's the genuine desire to help people and create comfort. A big part of being able to actively participate in a community is the comfort of knowing you are "doing it right." In my various community manager/architect roles, doling our comfort and assurance has been a big part of the job. At the same time, I often want the assurance from a lawyer that I'm doing the right thing, too. So my idea here was that I could step up the help-ladder by applying 15 years of FOSS experience with a helpful nature and law degree.
Yet as Luis says, I can just as likely make as much impact by continuing upward and outward with what I'm already doing. For example, the ten years it took to get the new relationship between Red Hat and CentOS required the help of lawyers, but I couldn't have done it as just a lawyer -- I needed to be embedded in Engineering, have a good reputation with the appropriate Business Units, and a strong community reputation. If I consider the time involved in becoming a lawyer, I could create and close on about three projects of an equal importance to the world.
Maybe another approach is to get strong community architects in a tighter relationship with the tech trans law firms. I presume they have some of that experience in house, but Luis is about the only person I know of with a (now) equal amount of open source project and legal experience. As with many things, it might be a better force multiplier to help train up existing tech trans lawyers by helping them through participating directly in projects in non-legal ways and being go-to people for "WTF community?!?" questions.
Regarding starting companies, my student in the 2007 GSoC, Dimitris Glezos, went on to form Transifex, a company built around the core coding efforts of that summer.