Staff
Management Team
Jim Zemlin
Executive Director
Zemlin’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, SaaS and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate the adoption of Linux and support the future of computing.
Zemlin’s career took root at Western Wireless, which had a successful IPO and was later acquired by Deutsche Telekom and renamed T-Mobile USA. He was also a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful IPO in July 2000. Other posts have included vice president of marketing at Covalent Technologies and executive director at Free Standards Group (FSG).
In his leadership role today at The Linux Foundation, Zemlin works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, HP, Nokia, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.
Zemlin has been recognized as one of the top 12 Linux and open source bloggers and is widely quoted in the press on Linux and the changing economics of the PC industry. He is a regular keynote speaker at industry events such as COMPUTEX, LinuxCon, Gartner’s Open Source Conference and Open Mobile Summit, among others. Zemlin advises a variety of startups, including DeviceVM, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union. Zemlin’s blog can be accessed at: http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/jzemlin/.
Amanda McPherson
Vice President, Marketing and Developer Programs
Amanda McPherson is a founding management team member of the Linux Foundation. She is responsible for content, web strategy, events, public relations and developer programs, including the Linux Developer Network. Highlights of her work with the Linux Foundation include: defining the initial brand and positioning of the organization, creating the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and authorizing multiple content pieces, including the "Who Writes the Linux Kernel" white paper. She has been involved in open source for the past eight years. Most recently, Amanda was director of marketing for the Free Standards Group, the certification and standardization authority for Linux. Prior to that she was director of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leading provider of Apache Web server software. Previously, she served at two of the industry's largest public relations and marketing agencies -- Cunningham Communication and Burson-Marsteller -- where her work was recognized by an industry award from the Public Relations Society of America. She was a core member of the marketing team responsible for the launch of the Java programming language in 1995. A published fiction author, Amanda graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Her work blog can be found at http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/.
Mike Woster
Vice President, Business Development
Mike Woster is the head of worldwide business development for the Linux Foundation expanding industry and corporate end user participation in the Linux platform and community. Woster most recently served as global account executive at Intel. Prior to that, he held a variety of roles in product marketing, customer marketing, and channels sales in the US and Europe. Both on the job and in his free time as a long time Linux user and advocate, Woster has helped major corporations, schools and small business migrate from proprietary operating systems to Linux. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. In his spare time, he serves as a director on a non-profit financial endowment board.
Noriaki Fukuyasu
Director of Linux Foundation Japan Operations
Noriaki Fukuyasu is the Director of Japan Operations for The Linux Foundation. Prior to joining The Linux Foundation, he lead the international business for a Japanese leading linux distributor, Turbolinux, Inc, as Director of International Business. He also served as the CEO of Zend Japan. He has a MA degree in International Relations from Nagoya University, and a BS from Lambuth University.
Daniel Cho
Director of Linux Foundation Korea
Mr. Daniel Cho is a pioneer in Software application, database R&D. His extensive career includes Samsung Corporation as a senior software engineer, Director for Samsung SDS division in France. His excellent track records & expertise integrating technology to sales & marketing lead to re‐location to the US to spearhead Samsung SDS division as Sales and Marketing Director.
Later he was selected to head Haansoft Inc. as a Senior Executive to increase reliability of its family of software applications and its hardware partners to double digit sales revenue increases within few years. (Kosdaq) Founding member of Asianux – Number 1 market share in Korea – a Linux O/S.
Currently Mr. Daniel Cho serves as the Director of Linux Foundation of Korea. He earned his BA of Computer Science in AJOU University as well as an MBA. Additionally, he was selected and earned his CEO recognition at KAIST.
Axel Petrak
Director of Linux Foundation EMEA
Mr. Axel Petrak serves as the Director of Linux Foundation Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Axel Petrak has more than 25 years of IT experience with positions that have spanned sales, business development and technology support. Prior to joining the Linux Foundation, he spent 13 years at Intel GmbH in Germany where he held senior management positions in sales, alliance management, and channel and business development. Most recently, Mr. Petrak was Director of Global Alliance & Sales, EMEA, for Intel’s embedded and telecommunications division. Before joining Intel, Mr. Petrak was at Banyan Systems where he worked in sales and technical support positions in both Australia and Germany.
Mr. Petrak holds a Certificate from the Australian Institute of Management and has completed the INSEAD Europe Campus Fontainbleau executive education training on “Market Strategy.” He is also Director of the Crew Welfare Initiative, a worldwide nonprofit organization focused on using Linux-based solutions to improve communications within the maritime industry.
Theodore Ts'o
Fellow and Chief Technology Officer
Theodore Ts'o was the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and organizes the Annual Linux Kernel Developer's Summit, which brings together the top 75 Linux Kernel Developers from all over the world for an annual face-to-face meeting. He was a founding board member of the Free Standards Group, and was chair of that organization until it merged with OSDL to form the Linux Foundation. He is one of the core maintainers for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is the primary author and maintainer for e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2/3/4 filesystems. At IBM, Theodore served as the architect for the Real-Time Linux development team.
Karen Copenhaver
Legal Counsel
Karen Copenhaver is a partner in Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP ‘s Business & Technology practice focusing on technology transfer and licensing of intellectual property with a specific emphasis on open source business models. Most recently, Copenhaver was executive vice president and general counsel at Black Duck Software, Inc.
Andy Updegrove
Legal Counsel
Andy Updegrove is a partner and founder of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a Boston-based technology law firm, and has represented and helped structure more than 80 worldwide standard setting, open source, promotional and advocacy consortia over the past 20 years. He has also represented hundreds of both emerging as well as established technology companies, and is the founder and editor of both the popular website http://www.consortiuminfo.org and the widely-read Standards Blog
Dan Kohn Senior Strategist
Dan previously worked as a general partner at Skymoon Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm in Palo Alto. He was the CEO of Pedestal Networks, an innovative DSL equipment company that was later acquired by UT Starcom. He also founded Habeas, an email accreditation and reputation company that helps legitimate mailers ensure delivery, and continues to serve on their board. Dan previously helped manage several telecoms firms controlled by Craig McCaw, including XO Communications, Nextel, ICO, and Teledesic. He started his career as founder and CEO of NetMarket, which set up the first music CD store, built the first commercial database-backed website, and conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994. Dan received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Computer Science from the Honors program of Swarthmore College, and studied at Exeter and the London School of Economics.
Fellows
Linus Torvalds
Fellow
Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and oversaw open source development of the widely-used Linux operating system.
Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
An avid computer programmer, Linus authored many gaming applications in his early years. After purchasing a personal computer with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum for use as a teaching tool. Torvalds started work on a new kernel, later to be named "Linux", in the fall of 1991 and after forming a team of volunteers to work on this new kernel, released V1.0 in the spring of 1994.
In 1996, Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit the California headquarters of Transmeta, a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving central processing unit (CPU). Torvalds then accepted a position at Transmeta and moved to California with his family. Along with his work for Transmeta, Torvalds continued to oversee kernel development for Linux.
In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
Fellowship Program
Please refer to the Community section for more information on the Linux Foundation Fellowship Program and the full list of our Fellows.
