IDG Contributor Network: Meet Karen Sandler, a force in open source

Karen Sandler is one of the most influential voices in the open source world.
I met with her last year and we talked about how free software affected and changed her life and how she is working to change the lives of others. It was a wide-ranging and inspirational conversation.First encounter of the computer kindSandler started programming at an early age. She wrote a lot of BASIC programs and attended engineering school. The first classes that she took were FORTRAN and C.  
In our convers