Founder & CEO of Ubuntu Software. 25 years building real-time, distributed systems for global enterprises—from investment banking trading floors to automotive manufacturing lines to government sensor fusion systems.
Now applying that experience to the convergence of AI and 3D design. The goal: bring spatial intelligence capabilities that were once locked in expensive proprietary systems to everyone who works in three dimensions.
Technical passions: Go, NATS JetStream, CRDTs, open standards (STEP, IFC), and building systems that work offline-first in real-world conditions.
Philosophy: Technology should serve human needs, not the other way around. Open standards beat proprietary lock-in. The best software disappears into the workflow.
The Journey
It Started With Flame
Gerard’s career began with Flame on Silicon Graphics machines—Autodesk’s high-end compositing system used by Hollywood for visual effects. What made Flame different wasn’t just the power. It was how it thought about dimensions.
Flame didn’t treat 2D as one thing, 3D as another, and time as yet another thing to bolt on later. It treated them all as first-class citizens in one unified environment. 2D, 3D, and 4D—where the fourth dimension is time, how things change, how they animate, how they evolve.
That was the first real glimpse of what’s possible when software doesn’t artificially separate dimensions. When the tool matches how the real world actually works.
The Tool Chaos
Over the years came AutoCAD, SketchUp, Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, and dozens of others. Every single one does something well. Every single one is awful at working with the others.
The CAD tools don’t talk to the desktop publishing tools. The 3D modeling tools don’t talk to the vector graphics tools. Everyone works in silos, passing files back and forth, losing fidelity at every handoff.
The realization: a CAD system, a game engine, and a video editor are fundamentally the same thing. They’re all dealing with geometry in space and time. They’re all compositing—combining elements into a coherent whole. The only difference is what you’re compositing for.
Government Sensor Fusion
Work on government systems brought sensor fusion challenges: data coming from multiple sources, different formats, different refresh rates. Radar. Cameras. GPS. All pouring in simultaneously, needing to be rendered into a coherent display.
The capability was powerful—but locked away. Locked in expensive proprietary systems. Locked behind classification levels. Locked in organizations with massive budgets.
Why can’t architects have this? Why can’t robotics engineers have this? Why can’t factory planners or city designers have access to this kind of spatial reasoning?
The answer wasn’t technical. Nobody had built it for them yet.
Prefab Factories in Sweden
Work with Swedish design-and-construct companies on prefab modular construction revealed the cost of disconnected systems. Three worlds had to talk perfectly: design, CAD, and factory.
The vision was beautiful. The reality was constant pain at the handoffs. Design changes that didn’t propagate to the factory floor. Factory constraints that didn’t feed back into design. Components that didn’t fit on site.
This is where the cost became tangible. Not just inconvenience. Actual money. Actual delays. Actual buildings that couldn’t be assembled because the pieces didn’t fit.
Building Systems in Germany
Work on building facility management, IoT, and AI systems in Germany brought another piece into place. Buildings aren’t just designs that get built and then done. Buildings are living systems with sensors, HVAC, occupancy patterns, maintenance schedules.
The digital twin concept makes sense—have a digital model that stays synchronized with physical reality. But nobody had built the infrastructure to make it work properly. The tools didn’t talk to each other. The data formats were incompatible. The real-time requirements were ignored.
The Document Problem
Running through every engagement was the document problem. Content needing to go out through multiple channels—website, PDF, print, forms—looking exactly right in every output. Add languages. Add time zones. Add distributed teams.
In engineering documents, a translation error means something gets built wrong. In government documents, an inconsistency means legal exposure. In medical or financial documents, mistakes genuinely hurt people.
The Same Problem
The realization: Spatial and Publish are the same problem. One is about 3D geometry, the other about documents. But underneath, they share the same fundamental challenge:
Complex outputs, multiple channels, distributed teams, zero room for error.
Same pattern. Same pain. Same need for a single source of truth that stays synchronized across every output and every collaborator.
Why Ubuntu Software
The technology finally caught up. CRDTs make real-time collaboration work without merge conflicts. AI can reason about spatial data, not just text. Open standards like STEP and IFC won the format wars.
The Name
Ubuntu Software has been building systems for 25 years. The name comes from the South African philosophy meaning “I am because we are”—chosen years before Canonical adopted the same word for their Linux distribution in 2004.
A happy coincidence: Gerard has spent those same decades building software that runs on Linux, embedded Linux, and OpenBSD. The philosophy fits perfectly—software that connects people, systems, and ideas.
Cross-Platform from Day One
After years of building with Qt, Flutter, and Electron, Gerard developed a proprietary cross-platform GUI framework. Applications that run natively on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android—from a single codebase. No compromises on performance or native feel.
Everything Gerard has built has been about making connections work—between platforms, between systems, between design and reality. Ubuntu Software is the culmination of that journey.
More About Us
Experience — 25 years of mission-critical systems for global enterprises.
Advisors — Industry leaders who collaborate with us.
Contact — Get in touch.