SpikeSource Announces Advisory Board
SpikeSource Press Release
23 Mar 2005
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Redwood City, Calif. – March 23, 2005 – SpikeSource, an open source IT services company, today announced the formation of an advisory board that will assist the company in furthering the adoption of open source in the enterprise. Open source community leaders Mitchell Baker, Brian Behlendorf, Dirk Hohndel, Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz, Marten Mickos, Tim O´Reilly, David Stutz, Larry Rosen and Steve Weber are all members.
“We are thankful that each of these incredibly talented individuals is involved with SpikeSource, and we are dedicated to working closely with them to help extend the benefits of open source software into the enterprises,” said SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese.
“SpikeSource´s focus on testing and certification of open source addresses one of the key barriers to corporate adoption,” said new board member Tim O´Reilly. “What´s more, their knowledge base and other online resources provide a valuable set of services, both to corporate users and to the open source development community.”
Members, each of whom has made a significant contribution to the open source community, include:
- Mitchell Baker, President, the Mozilla Foundation. Baker has been part of the mozilla.org team since its inception in 1998. She wrote the Netscape and Mozilla Public Licenses while Associate General Counsel at Netscape Communications. Baker also serves as board member of the Open Source Applications Foundation, where she guides the Open Source Applications Foundation´s relations with its community and partners.
- Brian Behlendorf, Founder and CTO, CollabNet. Behlendorf is the founder and CTO of CollabNet, a provider of distributed software development solutions. He is one of the most respected leaders of the international open-source software movement. Behlendorf was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. He served as president of the Foundation for three years, and remains on its Board of Directors.
- Dirk Hohndel, Director of Linux and Open Source Strategy, Intel Corporation. Hohndel has been active in the Linux space since its earliest days. Among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE Linux AG and as Vice President of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Prior to his position at SuSE, Hohndel was Unix Architect at Deutsche Bank, before that, he was a Senior Software Engineer for AIB Software Corporation and PLATINUM technology. Hohndel joined Intel in 2001. He works in the Software and Solutions Group and owns Linux and Open Source Strategy, helping the different business groups at Intel addressing the challenges and opportunities these disruptive technologies are bringing to Intel´s business and the IT industry as a whole.
- Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz, VP of Research and Executive Education, Optaros. r0ml is responsible for developing and leading the executive education platform and research agenda at Optaros, a provider of IT business services and solutions. Before Optaros, r0ml was at AT&T Wireless, where he was responsible for data warehousing, application integration, enterprise architecture, software productivity, business process modeling, and other enterprise software. He has spent 20 years in various IT roles on Wall Street, including the role of director of Open Source Strategy for a major international investment bank.
- Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. A native of Finland, Mickos holds a strong track record of leadership in global high-tech companies. Since joining MySQL in 2001, he has developed a profitable, sustainable business based on both open source values and support for corporate customers´ needs. His company´s flagship database is now the world´s most popular open source database, with more than six million active installations.
- Tim O´Reilly, Founder and CEO, O´Reilly Media. O´Reilly is a longtime pioneer in the popularization of the Internet and activist for Internet standards and open source software. He led public relations campaigns promoting open standards, organized protests against frivolous software patents, and received InfoWorld´s Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for Open Source advocacy. O´Reilly serves on the board of trustees for both the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Lawrence Rosen, Attorney. The founding partner of Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm in California, Rosen is an advisor to organizations and companies around the world on open source and other technology issues. He served as general counsel and secretary of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and also as its executive director. He wrote several of the open source licenses used today, and speaks and writes frequently on open source and open standards. Rosen is the author of Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (Prentice Hall 2004), which is also available under the Academic Free License on the rosenlaw.com website.
- David Stutz, Musician. During a 20-year tenure in software engineering, Stutz participated in the design of applications, programming languages, runtimes, component technologies, operating systems and developer tools. As a Microsoft executive, Stutz was deeply involved with the social issues and business opportunities presented by open source software, Linux, and the free software movement.
- Steven Weber, Director, Institute of International Studies, and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Weber is the author of The Success of Open Source, recently published by Harvard University Press, and numerous other publications on international relations and economics. His areas of special interest include international politics, and the political economy of knowledge-based industries and open-source software models.
“I like the SpikeSource model because their stacks simplify the acquisition and installation of the best open source software available today,” said Lawrence Rosen, open source legal expert. “Companies can run their internal business applications on top of SpikeSource stacks or build commercial products and let SpikeSource solve the compatibility or license issues.”
About Optaros
Optaros is a consulting and systems integration firm that helps enterprises solve IT business problems by providing services and solutions that maximize the benefits of open source software. Bringing together experts in creating enterprise IT solutions and experts in the power of open source, Optaros plans and builds business systems that give you better value today and increased control in the future. For more about Optaros, go to www.optaros.com