Russ Nelson

Russell Nelson 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.
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.

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,, in early 1995. He transferred the website to Friends Publishing Corporation, a Quaker nonprofit, in March 2018.