Russ Nelson (born 1958) is an American computer programmer, who is a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative. He is best known for his packet driver collection, begun while at Clarkson University in 1988. He started Crynwr Software to support his open source software Freemacs (currently used by FreeDOS), Painter's Apprentice (a MacPaint clone), and went full-time with the packet driver collection in 1991. to attempt to make a similar point without causing offense.