OSI Board of Directors

The Board of Directors of OSI consists of the following people (in alphabetical order of last name, except the OSI president is listed first):

Michael Tiemann - President

Michael Tiemann is a true open source software pioneer. He made his first major open source contribution over a decade ago by writing the GNU C++ compiler, the first native-code C++ compiler and debugger. His early work created world-leading technologies and also informed the first open source business model. In 1989, Tiemann's technical expertise and entreprenurial spirit led him to co-found Cygnus Solutions, the first company to provide commercial support for open source software. During his ten years at Cygnus, Tiemann contributed in a number of roles from President to hacker, helping to lead the company from a fledgling start-up to an admired open source leader. Tiemann is now Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, a leading supplier of Linux and Open Source software. Tiemann also provides financial support to organizations that further the goals of software freedom, including the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the GNOME Foundation.

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source software developer, author, and advocate. In 1995, he and Jim Blandy co-founded Cyclic Software, the first company offering commercial support for CVS, the free software version control system. In 1997 he added anonymous read-only repository access to CVS, and in 1999 wrote "Open Source Development With CVS" (Coriolis OpenPress). From 2000-2006, he worked for CollabNet, Inc on Subversion, an open source version control system written from scratch by CollabNet and a team of open source volunteers. In 2005 he wrote "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" (O'Reilly Media, also online at producingoss.com). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to dedicate more time to non-profit activities. He then worked at Canonical, Ltd on the open source release of the Launchpad.net collaboration platform, and now works as an Open Civics Development Specialist at O'Reilly Media, helping government entities participate in open source software and open community processes, assisting with programs at Code for America and Civic Commons, and continuing to participate in various open source projects.

Mike Godwin

Mike Godwin is an American attorney (lawyer) and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the creator of the Internet adage Godwin's Law. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Harshad Gune

Harshad Gune teaches computer science at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) in Pune, India. His primary experience with Open Source is as as educator. He has organized an annual FOSS conference, GNUnify since 2003 and helped promote FOSS technologies in India as well as support the FOSS community to grow stronger. The conference has grown to unite the FOSS community in India. As an active member of the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), Harshad has worked with others to educate students with FOSS software on computers, and has helped the industry learn more about the power of Linux through participation in IT trade shows and holding workshops.

Jim Jagielski

Jim Jagielski has been hacking and contributing to Open Source since long before it was even called that. Jim is best known for his deep, long-term involvement in open source and with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Within the ASF, which he co-founded, Jim is an active, core developer in numerous projects, including Apache Tomcat, Apache APR, and Apache HTTPd, in which he is the longest active committer within that project. He also serves on the board of directors of the ASF, a position he has held since its inception. At the ASF he has served as EVP/Secretary for 8 years, Chairman for 3 years and presently serves as President. He is also on the board of directors with the Outercurve Foundation. Over his career, Jim has served as CTO for Zend Technologies and Covalent Technologies and as Chief Open Source Officer, Principal Software Engineer for VMware/SpringSource and is currently Sr Consulting Software Engineer for Red Hat working under the office of the CTO. He founded jaguNET Access Services, a web solutions company and he also was a manager and engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has spoken and presented at numerous conferences and seminars, and is a sought after resource by reporters and analysts regarding Apache and open source in general. He is also a noted author, having written numerous articles, including a monthly section in several magazines. Previously, he was also editor of the Apache section on Slashdot. He still foundly remembered in some circles as the editor of the A/UX FAQ.

Prof. Fabio Kon

Fabio Kon is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and has been using and developing open source software since the early 1990s. His research interests include FLOSS Development and Quality Assessment, Distributed Systems, Mobile Computing, Reflective Middleware, Agile Software Development, Grid and Cloud Computing, Computer Music, and Multimedia Systems. Fabio has published over 100 scientific papers and, in the last 10 years, he has been the Principal Investigator of several software development research projects funded by research agencies and by research labs. These projects include innovative open source systems such as InteGrade in the area of Grid Computing and Borboleta in the area of Mobile Health Systems. He is, currently, the Director of the University of São Paulo FLOSS Competence Center, which hosts over 15 open source projects and promotes courses, seminars, and research projects on free and open source software.

Dr. Martin Michlmayr - Secretary

Dr. Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various open source software projects for well over 10 years. He used to be the Volunteer Coordinator for the GNUstep Project, acted as Publicity Director for Linux International and served as the leader of the Debian project. In the two years as the leader of Debian, Martin represented the project and performed important organizational and coordination tasks within the project. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Andrew Oliver

Andrew C. Oliver is a professional cat herder who moonlights as a software developer. He's been developing in Java since 1998, primarily as a consultant for large companies with the inevitable dot-com thrown in between. He is a former member of the Apache Software Foundation, former member of the Apache Jakarta PMC, and founder of the Apache POI project. When he's not off globe-trotting to provide training, consulting and support to Open Software Integrators LLC's customers, you can find him bit-twiddling with some obscure file format or protocol. Andy resides in Durham, NC with his wife and three boys. In his spare time he reads Churchill, other biographies and histories, goes to plays with his wife, plays with his kids, goofs in his blog.

Simon Phipps

Computer industry veteran Simon Phipps has engaged at a strategic level in the world's leading technology companies. He has worked in roles such as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the 80s, on collaborative conferencing software in the 90s, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. He takes an active interest in Free and Open Source software, serving at OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and OpenSPARC as well as at the Open Source Initiative, and is a widely read thought-leader. In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun's employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating Sun's extensive participation in Free and Open Source software until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the Java platform, Solaris UNIX, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun's portfolio, all under open source licenses. An outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) for businesses and governments, he has been an advisor to local and national government agencies across Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America as they have devised and implemented strategies around Free and Open Source software. He holds a BA in electronic engineering and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and Chartered Engineer. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.com

Alolita Sharma - Treasurer

Alolita Sharma has been involved with open source since the early days of Linux. She has actively promoted open source software adoption in industry, government and developing economies for the past 12 years, working with leaders in US and India's IT industry, government and education to enable change and transparency. She believes that the ideas of open source can generate unbounded opportunity for the development of technology and economic prosperity in developing nations. She is co-founder of Technetra and has over 15 years in the industry. She joined the OSI board in 2007 and currently serves as Secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). She co-created India's first open source business conference LinuxAsia, to serve as a platform for global industry leaders to interact with India's open source players from industry, government, academia and community. She speaks internationally on open source trends, technologies and building successful communities. Her publications include a chapter on Open Source in India in Open Sources 2.0, a regular column on trends in Linux For You and open source technology reviews in Linux Journal. She holds a Bachelors degree with honors in Computer Science from George Mason University and a Masters degree with honors in Computer Science from George Washington University where she also pursued doctoral studies. She blogs about open source technology, policies, education and culture at Open Source Buzz. Her Twitter handle is alolita.

Dr. Tony Wasserman

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman is a Professor in the Software Management MS program at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of its Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), focused on evaluation and adoption of open source software. In 1980, as a Professor at UC San Francisco, he released the software for his User Software Engineering research project under a BSD open source license. Subsequently, as CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), he incorporated some of that software in IDE's Software through Pictures multiuser modeling environment, released in 1984, making it among the very first commercial products to include open source software. After IDE, Tony was VP of Engineering for a dot-com, and later became VP of Bluestone Software, where his open source Total-e-Mobile toolkit allowed mobile devices to connect to JavaEE web applications. Tony is very active in the international open source research community, and served as General Chair of the 2009 Int'l.Conf. on Open Source Systems. He is on the Board of Advisors of Open Source for America, and was co-founder of the Business Readiness Rating project. Tony is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. Tony has traveled to more than 50 countries and posts many of his travel photos on his Flickr page. His Twitter handle is twasserman.

You can send mail to the OSI board at osi at opensource.org.

OSI Board Observers

Ken Coar (PGP key)

Ken Coar is a director and Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation. He has over two decades of experience with network software and applications, system administration, system programming, process analysis, technical support, and computer security. Ken knows more than a dozen programming languages, but mostly writes in Perl, PHP, and C. He has worked with the World-Wide Web since 1992, been involved with Apache since 1996, and was a co-author of the CGI RFC. He is the author of Apache Server for Dummies and co-author of Apache Server Unleashed and Apache Cookbook. We has written articles for Linux Planet, Apache Today, Linux Magazine, and ACM Queue. He gives presentations around the world on Apache, open software, and distributed development. He somewhat spastically maintains a Web log, 'The Rodent's Burrow', at http://Ken.Coar.Org/burrow/.

Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper has an 19-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Cooper worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun's Chief Open Source Evangelist and founded Sun's Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as its Treasurer. After four years advising Intel on Open Source Strategies, and a brief stint at the startup REvolution Computing, in 2010 she took on the job of CTO for the Wikimedia Foundation. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.

Russell Nelson (PGP key)

Russell Nelson has been giving away his software since he started writing it in 1974. Prior to his GPLed Freemacs package, there weren't many people to distribute it to. He really came to the fore with his Packet Driver Collection, begun while a staff member at Clarkson University. A GPLed set of DOS Ethernet drivers, they arguably put GPL'ed software on more CPUs than anything prior to Linux. McDonalds uses them in their cash registers, so they're literally a world-wide phenomenon. Supporting free software full-time since 1991, Russell lives and works in Potsdam, NY, where he's trying to figure out how to share his 384Kbps connection with his neighbors wirelessly. In August of 2009 he started work for Clarkson University on the Beacon Institute's REON project.

Nnenna Nwakanma

Nnenna Nwakanma holds a triple Bachelors, in the Social Sciences, History and English and a Masters degree in International Relations and Law. She has done large-scale work within International development organizations and institutions in Africa on Information, Documentation and International Relations. Among them, The Home Health Education Service, The Helen Keller Foundation and The African Development Bank. Co-founder of different pan-African organizations: The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), The Africa Network of Information Society Actors (ANISA), and the Africa Civil Society for the Information Society (ACSIS). One of the major Civil Society Actors in the World Summit on the Information Society, she represents the African Civil Society on the Digital Solidarity Fund, and advises on the Africa Information Society Initiative. Today she is Council Chair of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa, and also runs her own Platform of Development Consultants - nnenna.org

OSI Legal Counsel

Mark Radcliffe - General Counsel

Mark Radcliffe is a partner with DLA Piper and he is resident in the firm's Silicon Valley office. He focuses on representing clients in intellectual property and finance matters. He has extensive experience helping companies identify, protect and exploit their IP, and he has worked with U.S.-based clients and large international companies. In 1997, the National Law Journal named Mr. Radcliffe one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States. In 1998, Harvard Law School designated him a "Distinguished Alumni." Mr. Radcliffe was named in the International Whos Who of e-Commerce Lawyers (2nd Edition). He has spoken at major conferences and industry presentations, including OSBC and OSCON, about open source and other intellectual property issues. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry, magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981.

OSI Web Support Team

The OSI web support team includes members of the infrastructure committee. Special thanks Brian Behlendorf who has generously provided hosting services for OSI's website.

OSI Founders

Eric S. Raymond - Founder & President Emeritus (PGP key)

Eric designed the language and marketing tactics around which the OSI was formed. He and Bruce Perens co-founded the organization. Eric lives in Malvern, Pennsylvania, USA.

Bruce Perens - Co-Founder & Emeritus Board Member

Bruce Perens is a computer programmer and advocate in the open source community. He co-founded the OSI with Eric S. Raymond and architect of the Open Source Definition.

Other OSI Emeritus Members