Tony Wasserman

Anthony I. Wasserman (born March 1, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He was the founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments, Inc., one of the first dotcoms. He was later a Professor of the Practice in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley from 2005 to 2023.

Wasserman was executive director of the Carnegie Mellon's Center for Open Source Investigation,[1] and was a SkyDeck accelerator program advisor at University of California, Berkeley.[2] He was a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative from 2010 to 2016.[3][4] In 2025 he won a lifetime achievement award from the IEEE. He currently works at Software Methods and Tools.[5]

As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus, Wasserman directed the Software Management curriculum and taught classes in software product definition, software product strategy, and open source software.[6][3] He is a frequent speaker at Open Source conferences around the world including the Open World Forum.[7] He was the general chair of the tenth international conference on Open Source systems, OSS2014, in Costa Rica.[8]

After serving as a Professor of Medical Information Science at the University of California, San Francisco and as a Lecturer in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley, Wasserman founded and was CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), a computer-aided software engineering company that was one of the first 100 dotcoms (no. 78), from 1983-1993 (7), and as Chair from 1983-1996. He then became vice president of Bluestone Software before its acquisition by Hewlett Packard, leading the development of early mobile applications.[1]

In 1996 he was elected as a fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to software engineering, including the development of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools".[9] In the same year he also was selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for technical and professional contributions to the field of software engineering".[10] In 2025, he won a IEEE Technical Community on Software Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award.[5]

Wasserman's academic research focused on two projects: the User Software Engineering (USE) project, begun at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1975[11] and the Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), begun at Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley, in 2005. The focus of the User Software Engineering project was "user-centered design, combined with techniques for software engineering, in order to produce systems that are reliable, easy to use, and well adapted to user needs."[12][13] The focus of the COSI work is evaluation and adoption of open source software by businesses and organizations, originally the Business Readiness Rating,[14] now OSSpal.[15] Wasserman earned his A.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 with a double major in Mathematics and Physics, and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1970.[16]