Name Chip Salzenberg | Role Programmer | |
Chip Salzenberg is an American programmer mostly noted for his involvement in the Perl and Free Software communities. Salzenberg has been involved with Perl development for over 15 years, and with Free Software for more than 20 years.
In 1996 and 1997, he was project manager for Perl 5.004, a Perl release widely praised for its high quality. Salzenberg went on to teach Perl and write professionally.
He was one of the founding board members of the Open Source Initiative, which approves Open Source licenses. At VA Linux Systems, Salzenberg was Linux kernel coordinator and wrote software for the manufacturing line. He also became a Debian developer in 1999.
Salzenberg has been published on the subjects of Perl and Usenet. He used to be the Architect for the Parrot virtual machine project.
Legal issues
In the spring of 2005, Salzenberg became recognized as a "whistleblower" by calling out the unethical processes of Health Market Science (HMS), a company in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The response by HMS was to file a police report alleging Salzenberg of a felony disclosing private company information. This resulted in a seizure of his personal computer assets. However, the district attorney did not file any criminal charges and instead attempted to return the seized property back to Salzenberg. In a last-ditch effort by HMS to keep Salzenberg's evidence from going public, HMS' attorneys filed an emergency motion to preserve evidence and re-seized the property for a civil suit. As of October, 2009, Salzenberg's computers sit under lock and key at Capsicum Group LLC, a digital forensics consultancy, paid by HMS, awaiting release pending a civil hearing. Friends of Salzenberg since has initiated a "geeksunite" website, soliciting donations for the legal fees he incurred due to the wrangling of court system by HMS.
Salzenberg's whistle-blowing was the result of the "HMS Harvester Tool" hijacking "open proxies" (unprotected public computers) on the web and using these open proxies to power their harvesting.