Opersys, Inc.'s origins date far back in the early '90s when there was no operating system choice. Rather than concentrating on the primary goal of development, designers had to write their own OS or purchase very expensive OSes and then try to get the bugs fixed by the vendor.

   Early on, we recognized that Linux was about to change all that, although we could not have predicted that it would actually get this far. We are pleased today to see Linux and open-source projects being adopted on a large-scale and in very different fields of applications, some differing in many orders of magnitude in complexity and computer power from others. Linux today runs as much on a PDA as it runs on clusters. A few years back it was still mainstream thought that no OS could actually serve such a wide-range of applications.

   However pleasing the current situation may be, there is a side-effect to this transformation. There is now a huge body of work available in open-source for the masses to use and this resource is constantly shifting, evolving and maturing. It is difficult for a developer to choose a milestone reference and select open-source components accordingly while continuing work on his/her main field of expertise. Some try to solve this problem by using reference distributions, but these packages may be too rigid and prohibitive. Also, this does not solve the problem of custom application development, setup customization and accessible personnalized support.

   We at Opersys aim at filling this need by providing our clients with a bridge between their field of expertise and the open-source world. We do not want to be a ferry, we want our clients to be able to cross from their field of expertise over to the open-source world with as little effort as possible. We know this is possible, we have done it before and have seen very positive results from this type of relationship.

   Based on these aims and experiences, Opersys was founded in 1999 by open-source developer Karim Yaghmour and has been both a profitable and enjoyable entreprise since. Karim Yaghmour holds an M.A.Sc. and a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal. His thesis on the development of the Linux Trace Toolkit was selected best thesis of the Computer Engineering department for his graduation year.