Tarus Balog has been involved in managing communications networks professionally since 1988, and unprofessionally since 1978 when he got his first computer - a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. After working as a network management consultant for many years, he got involved in open source software through the OpenNMS Project starting in 2001 and became the maintainer of the project in 2002. He built a company around that project that counted some of the world's largest companies as customers, and the company was sold in 2019. Since 2022 he has been an advocate for open source at Amazon Web Services as a Principal Open Source Strategist.