Board Members

The Linux Foundation board of directors currently consists of 16 directors, as specified by the Bylaws.

Larry Augustin -- Individual Member Representative

Larry Augustin is an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of compiere, Fonality, Hyperic, Medsphere, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and XenSource. Previously he was a Director of JBoss (acquired by Red Hat Software) and Linux International (LI). One of the group who coined the term "Open Source", he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs in 2000. Previously he served as interim CEO of Medsphere. From September 2002 to December 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners where he helped lead Azure's investments in Zend and Medsphere. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he served as CEO until August 2002 and led the company through an IPO in December 1999. At VA Linux, he launched SourceForge.net, the world's largest Open Source software development community. Also at VA, he acquired Andover.net, merging SourceForge.net, Linux.com, Slashdot, and other well-known Open Source Internet sites to form the Open Source Development Network (OSDN).

Larry holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. Larry can be found online at http://lmaugustin.com.

James Bottomley, Technical Advisory Board Member

James Bottomley is an active member of the open source community. He maintains the SCSI subsystem, the MCA subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver. He was born and grew up in the United Kingdom. He went to university at Cambridge in 1985 for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He joined AT&T Bell labs in 1995 to work on Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 1997 he moved to the LifeKeeper HA project. He has spoken before at LinuxWorld, Usenix ATC, ALS, OLS and the Kernel Summit. James is also a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation.

Mark Charlebois, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC)

Mark Charlebois is a Director of Open Source Software Strategy at Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC), a subsidiary of Qualcomm, Inc. He has been developing software for Unix, Linux and embedded systems for more than 20 years. Charlebois joined Qualcomm in 1999, where he initially worked on the GlobalStar satellite system. He subsequently led one of the core subsystem teams for MediaFLO, defining core parts of the system information protocol, and holds patents related to that work. He has worked for several years in various R&D organizations at Qualcomm and created the initial Penelope extension to Thunderbird that formed the basis for Open Source Eudora. While in R&D, Charlebois was an open source evangelist who helped drive the company’s open source strategy. Recently, he has moved to QuIC to take a more active role in defining its open source strategy and community engagements.

Prior to Qualcomm, Charlebois worked at LMI in greater Vancouver, designing laser scanners. He also worked for CGI in Toronto as a real-time systems consultant using various Unix systems. Charlebois holds a bachelor’s degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a master’s degree in Engineering Science from Simon Fraser University.

Alan Clark, Novell

As a member of SUSE Linux Senior Staff, Alan focuses on Linux, industry initiatives and emerging standards. To facilitate the awareness and adoption of open source and open standards, Alan chairs the openSUSE project and participates in several Industry forum steering committees, technical committees and work groups and other open source projects.

With over 20 years of experience as a Software Engineer, a principal portion of Alan's career has been devoted to the research and development of operating systems and distributed multi-platform server services. His experience is with file systems, Directory Services, LDAP Services, Object Databases, Security, Developer Interfaces, Web Services, Network Protocols and more.

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle

Wim Coekaerts is Vice President of Linux Engineering for Oracle, reporting to Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven. He is responsible for managing Oracle's Unbreakable Linux strategy with a dedicated focus on ensuring large enterprises can adopt Linux quickly. Mr. Coekaerts has spent more than 7 years building a large-scale development and support organization and has fostered comprehensive customer and partner relationships, which helps drive the company's evolution of Linux. Additionally, his group develops and makes on-going contributions to the Linux community, including the first Cluster File System to be accepted into the Linux mainline kernel in 2006.

Yoshiya Eto, Fujitsu

Yoshiya Eto is a director at Fujitsu and has been involved in operating systems at Fujitsu including development and development management of Fujitsu proprietary operating systems and Linux.
For over ten years he has been leading Linux community engineers in Fujitsu and working with Linux community. This team is one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel and is continuously contributing patches to improve feature and stability of Linux for enterprise usage. In addition, Eto is also leading core engineering team for enterprise customer support through collaboration with distributor and community. This team has been providing highly reliable customer support to mission critical customers.

Frank Fanzilli

Frank Fanzilli is a seasoned software veteran and advisory to early and late stage software companies. Previously, he held the post of Global Chief Information Officer and Managing Director at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) where he grew the technology business into a $2 billion division with operations in all major financial centers.

In addition to his board seat at The Linux Foundation, Frank today serves on the board of InterWoven Inc., a Sunnyvale, California based content-management software provider, where he is also chairman of the Strategy Committee and was formerly Chairman of the Board; CommVault Inc., a fast-growing software company in the data backup space which launched a successful IPO in 2006.

Frank also serves on the boards of Calypso, a privately held financial derivatives software developer located in San Francisco; IT Structures, an early stage company in the virtualization of software testing; and Correlix, an early stage company which develops software to improve the performance of trading systems. Formerly, Frank was a founder of nLayers, Inc., a privately held software company which was acquired by EMC in 2006, and was a director of PeopleSoft (sold to Oracle) and Avaya (sold to Silverlake/TPG). In addition, he is an advisor to several venture capital firms on the west coast. Frank holds an M.B.A in Finance from New York University and a B.S. in Management from Fairfield University.

Doug Fisher, Intel

Doug Fisher is Vice President, Software and Solutions Group (SSG), and general manager of SSG’s Systems Software Division at Intel. He leads a worldwide organization responsible for a broad range of development, enabling, architecture analysis and optimization efforts including pre-boot firmware, operating systems, virtualization, middleware software, graphics, SoftSDV and client/server projections. In addition, Fisher has been named the Intel corporate “Mega Initiative” owner for virtualization.

Fisher joined Intel in 1995 and for the first few years managed several new product development and research efforts including projects around remote LAN access, data over VBI, and “Internet in a box” before moving to Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group where he led the Server Management Software development organization for three years. In 1999, Fisher transferred to Intel Online Services as the director of engineering for Europe and moved to England to set up the international engineering organization. In 2000, he was appointed director of worldwide engineering for Intel Online Services.

Prior to joining Intel, Fisher worked for 10 years at Hewlett-Packard where he started his career as a software developer on a real-time operating system with his final role as the marketing manager over the OpenView Network Node Manager product line. Fisher holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, and a master’s degree in management from Stanford University.

Dan Frye, IBM

Daniel D. Frye, Vice President - IBM Open Systems Development, is the head of IBM’s Linux development team - the IBM Linux Technology Center (LTC) - and is responsible for overseeing IBM’s Linux technical strategy and IBM’s participation in the open source Linux development community.

The mission of the LTC is to help the global open source Linux community make Linux better, to ensure Enterprise-level Linux support for IBM’s Hardware, Software, and Services brands, and to help expand the reach of Linux into new markets. LTC engineers are trusted, valued members of dozens of open source communities and contribute broadly to open source in many respects.

Prior to his current responsibilities, Dr. Frye was a member of IBM’s Emerging Technologies and Business Opportunities team where he worked on company-wide technical strategies that predicted future trends and transitions in the IT industry. It was during this time that Dr. Frye co-authored the original IBM corporate strategies for Linux and open source. Since then, Dr. Frye has been a key participant in both the IBM-wide Linux and open source core teams that have overseen the adoption of Linux and open source as key strategic initiatives for IBM.

Dr. Frye has an M.A. in Physics from The Johns Hopkins University (1982) and a B.A. in Physics from the University of Idaho (1979). He also received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Atomic Physics from The Johns Hopkins University (1985). Dr. Frye is a member of multiple Linux and open source industry groups including being a founding Board Member of The Linux Foundation.

Bdale Garbee, Individual Member Representative

Bdale Garbee first contributed to Free Software in 1979, has a long history of involvement in the Debian distribution, and is Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux at HP. In 2008, Bdale received a "Lutèce d'Or" as FLOSS personality of the year from FniLL. He holds a "level 3" high power rocketry certification, the highest in the rocketry hobby, but his primary hobby still seems to be turning all of his other hobbies in to open source projects.

Hisashi Hashimoto, Hitachi

Hisashi Hashimoto has been working on the development and management of commercial operating systems based on UNIX since he joined Hitachi. His responsibilities encompass both workstations and mainframes. He also has extensive experience managing collaborative development with other UNIX vendors. He now works with the Open Source Software Technology Center and is responsible for the collaboration with other vendors and the OSS community, including the work with the Open Source Software Promotion Forum in Japan.

Mark Lee, Splashtop

Mark is Co-Founder and CEO of Splashtop, the creator of Splashtop Instant-On Desktop, the leading Linux-based instant-on platform shipping on millions of PCs from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, Sony, and others. Splashtop contributes to various open source projects, and is leading the push to bring Linux to hundreds of millions of users around the world. Prior to Splashtop, Mark was a co-founder and CEO of OSA Technologies. Founded in 2000, OSA raised a total of $20M from Intel, Dell, Quanta, Foxconn, UMC, Storm Ventures, Sycamore Ventures, and others. OSA was acquired by Avocent in 2004 for $100M. Mark continued to serve as Senior VP of Avocent until June of 2006. Prior to OSA, Mark spent over 7 years at Intel. Mark received his MS and BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and executive MBA from ASU.

Brian Pawlowski, NetApp

Brian Pawlowski is senior vice president and chief technology officer at NetApp. Since joining NetApp in 1994, he has been involved in the design of high-performance, highly reliable storage systems.

Pawlowski has worked on open protocols for storage since he held an earlier position at Sun Microsystems. He was coauthor of the NFS Version 3 specification and is cochair of the NFS Version 4 working group at the IETF which has just released the forthcoming open standard for file sharing NFS Version 4.1. Pawlowski led the design team for NetApp's first SAN product and holds several patents related to that work. He also started the Advanced Technology Group at NetApp in 2004 to conduct storage research. Research focus areas for ATG include virtualization and advances in storage efficiency and green technologies working in partnership with companies like Vmware, Microsoft and the Xen community. In addition to funding collaborative projects with university research centers, Pawlowski has taken and active role in the development of our intern and university recruiting programs to move them into a strategic business investment.

Pawlowski manages strategies around standards and industry consortiums for NetApp. Additionally, he has been driving the Open Source strategy at NetApp, defining NetApp's community engagements, and directing funding to open source efforts, such as FreeBSD, Linux, and Xen, critical to NetApp customer success.

Pawlowski is on the board of trustees for The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and this year is on the Women of Vision Award selection committee.

Chris Schlaeger, AMD

Chris Schlaeger joined Advanced Micro Devices in April of 2006 as Director of the newly founded Operating System Research Center. In this capacity, he ensures that upcoming AMD processors meet the needs of modern operating systems and manages the teams that are contributing to popular Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel and the Xen hypervisor.

Prior to AMD he worked as VP of Engineering for Novell and SUSE. He was instrumental in expanding SUSEs product portfolio into the enterprise -- including the addition of several new hardware platforms such as AMD x86-64, IBM i, p and zSeries. He also expanded SUSEs "Single Source Code for all hardware platforms" strategy from 3 to 10 different hardware platforms.

Chris has been an Open Source developer since 1991. He is a long-time member of the KDE Core Team and founder of the TaskJuggler Project Management Software project. He still is an active Open Source developer in his spare time.

Tsugikazu Shibata, NEC

Tsugikazu Shibata is the Senior Manager of NEC and has an extensive background in the development and management of proprietary operating systems, including work with mainframes and super computers. He currently belongs to the Open Source Software Promotion Center of NEC; there he works collaborately with vendors and the open source community. Mr. Shibata has also occupied a senior role in the Linux Foundation's Japan Linux Symposium.