John Ackermann, N8UR
John (left) visiting with Febo's cousin Irving
Mumbai, India (05/2001)
I work at NCR Corporation in Dayton, Ohio as an in-house lawyer. I provide legal support to NCR's Worldwide Customer Services business, which provides hardware maintenance and software support for our customers.
I'm particularly interested in copyright issues and the questions that the Internet and electronic commerce raise about intellectual property rights. I'm very interested in the legal issues surrounding the Open Source Movement and I've given numerous presentations on open source licensing, including at the University of Dayton School of Law Computer and Cyberspace Law program. My materials and presentations are available for download here. I'm also an adjunct professor at the UD School of Law, where I teach a course on Licensing Intellectual Property.
And, for nearly four years (it seems like a lifetime...) I was very involved in NCR's "Year 2000" program -- that was an interesting experience! Now that we've made it through 01/01/2000, I proudly wear my official NCR Y2K Team Been There, Done That, Next Crisis shirt. Of course, anybody with any sense these days disavows that they ever had anything to do with Y2K...
My main hobby interests are amateur (ham) radio and computers, and I combine the two by helping develop systems to let computers communicate digitally via ham radio.
From 2000 through 2005, I was President of Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR), which despite its name is a national group dedicated to advancing the digital radio frontier. I'm still on the TAPR board, and am enjoying my free time working on projects like the TADD-1.
I'm an Assistant Director for the Great Lakes Division of the American Radio Relay League, our national ham radio organization. Locally, I'm a member of the Midwest VHF/UHF Society, a technically oriented bunch here in Dayton.
My ham radio callsign is N8UR; I previously held calls AG9V, WB9OWI and WN9OWI. Because I'm lucky enough to travel every now and then to Australia, I hold the callsign VK2ISU there. It's a bit frightening, but I've been a ham long enough now to be a member of the Quarter Century Wireless Association (QCWA).
I used to be very interested in photography, but for a number of reasons -- not least of which is the vision condition that's described in Keratoconus and Cornea Transplants -- I gave up on cameras over twenty years ago. Recently, I've become a modestly active photographer and that, coupled with the chance I've had to visit some interesting places as a result of business travel, has led to a few images I've put at John's Photo Gallery.
You can get in touch with me by clicking the "Email" link to the left.