Harald Welte

Harald Welte is a freelancer, consultant, enthusiast, freedom fighter and hacker who is working with Free Software (and particularly the Linux kernel) since 1995. His first major code contribution to the kernel was within the netfilter/iptables packet filter.

He has started a number of other Free Software and Free Hardware projects, mainly related to RFID such as librfid, OpenMRTD, OpenBeacon, OpenPCD, OpenPICC. During 2006 and 2007 Harald became the co-founder of OpenMoko, where he served as Lead System Architect for the worlds first 100% Open Free Software based mobile phone.

Aside from his technical contributions, Harald has been pioneering the legal enforcement of the GNU GPL license as part of his gpl-violations.org project. More than 150 inappropriate use of GPL licensed code by commercial companies have been resolved as part of this effort, both in court and out of court. He has received the 2007 "FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software" and the "2008 Google/O'Reilly Open Source award: Defender of Rights".

In 2008, Harald started to work on Free Software on the GSM protocol side, both for passive sniffing and protocol analysis, as well as an actual network-side GSM stack implementation called OpenBSC. In 2010, he expanded those efforts by creating OsmocomBB, a GSM teleophony-side baseband processor firmware and protocol stack. Other recent projects include OsmocomTETRA, a receive-only implementation of the ETSI TETRA radio interface.

Harald is co-founder of sysmocom - systems for mobile communications GmbH, but continues to operate his technology consulting business hmw-consulting.de