Harald Welte

Harald has been fascinated by electronics since childhood days, and remains fascinated by both electronics (from analog to digital) and computers ever since.

Self-taught in various technology fields, Harald started his professional life with a vocational degree as a wireless communications electronics technician with GRUNDIG in the 1990s and then started to volunteer as system administrator at an early non-profit ISP in the south of Germany. In the second half of the 1990s, his dedication to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) began, and by 2000, he became a member of the core team of netfilter/iptables, the Linux kernel firewalling subsystem.

Harald has a long association with the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Germany’s oldest and largest hacker community.

His primary interest is in the area of communications protocols. He occasionally dabbles closer to the physical layer, but primarily lives in Layer 2 and above in the protocol stacks, including GSM, TETRA, and LTE. He is a frequent speaker on related topics at technical conferences, where many of the recordings can be found at media.ccc.de.

The enthusiasm for Free Software didn’t stop at writing code: he became the first person to enforce the GNU GPLv2 in court as part of his activities at gpl-violations.org. His work on legal enforcement of copyleft licenses were recognized with the Free Software Foundations 2007 Advancement of Free Software award as well as the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award 2007.

During 2006 and 2007, in a world before the iPhone and Android, he was working as lead system architect of Openmoko, a Taiwan-based company developing the world’s first 100% open Linux-based smartphone.

Ever since then, Harald has focused his energy toward Open Source implementations of cellular communications protocol stacks. He co-started OpenBSC and later co-founded the Osmocom (Open Source Mobile Communications) project in 2010, which is now the home to a community running more than 100 software, firmware, and hardware projects in the area of SDR and telecommunications – including the ubiquitous librtlsdr.

As a day job, Harald runs sysmocom, a commercial entity providing primarily development and support services to professional users of the Osmocom implementations of cellular protocol stacks.

Despite working with radio and wireless communications for decades, he has never become a licensed ham. He hopes his background and experience will bring some insights and contacts into digital communications communities beyond the ham community and also to the ARDC board.

“While ARDC’s roots are at the intersection of ham radio and the Internet, digital communication is now a critical element of almost every aspect of modern life,” states ARDC President Bdale Garbee KB0G. “Harald’s wealth of experience working on free implementations of broadly-used wireless communication technologies expands our board’s perspective, and I look forward to his connections in the European hacker community furthering our ability to pursue key elements of our organizational mission.”

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Harald joining the board,” says ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter KJ7RYV.“ In addition to being well renowned in the open source world for his lifetime of work, his presence helps us to ideally further our international reach.”

You can learn more about Harald by visiting his personal website: https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/.