“Twice a week, Dr. Alain Empain drives his car away from his
solar-paneled home in the Belgian countryside, then parks and
boards a train that an hour and 10 minutes later will take him to a
bus, which half an hour later will take him a small village called
Meise and to his job as a botanist with Belgium’s National Botanic
Garden, where since the early 1990s he has been a persistent
pioneer of open source software.“Empain has spent the last several decades, as he puts it,
‘mixing biology and the nascent … informatics world.’ Empain
first connected a few computers to a Unix minicomputer in 1986; he
was experimenting with Linux by 1993; soon after that had the first
Linux server in the Belgian federal government, and by 1998 had
switched not only servers but desktops at the National Botanic
Garden to Linux…”
Portrait: Dr. Alain Empain Helps Grow Open Source
By
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