Linux Foundation Board Elects Longtime Community Members to Chair and Vice Chair

The Linux Foundation today is announcing its new Board Chair Nithya Ruff and Vice Chair Wim Coekaerts, both of whom bring a long history of contribution, collaboration and developer advocacy to their new positions. Both existing board members, these new roles will allow them to deepen their stewardship and support for Linux and open source projects across industries.

Nithya’s passion for open source was ignited while at SGI in the 1990s. Since then, open source development and contribution have been the driving force in her career, and she has dedicated herself to developer and community advocacy and diverse open source contribution. She has founded open source program offices at companies like Western Digital and has led teams of product managers and developers across a variety of companies, building a world-class embedded Linux distribution and being on the founding teams of many open source projects and efforts. Today she is the head of Comcast’s Open Source Program Office.

“It is an honor to be elected Chair of the Linux Foundation board to work with the global open source community, navigating and enabling the adoption of emerging and established open technologies,” said Nithya Ruff. “The combination of company and developer support for open source results in stronger and more sustainable open source communities. It takes an ecosystem to build open source, and I’m happy to be among so many who serve in this effort.”

Much of Wim’s career has been dedicated to working in the open source community to advance Linux in the enterprise. With a long history of managing engineering and developer teams at Oracle, Wim has been at the forefront of every major technical development in the enterprise for more than 15 years, and his personal experience contributing to Linux and the Linux kernel makes him a natural advocate and advisor for developers and technologists who are just beginning to contribute to Linux and other open source projects.

“The Linux Foundation has been doing a lot of important work in the open source community for many years. Whether it’s bringing important projects together, bringing developers and companies together or providing important services across all projects and programs, it has been a consistent steward for sustainable communities. As a long-time board member of the Linux Foundation, I am proud to have been elected Vice Chair and looking forward to working even closer with the community,” said Wim Coekaerts.

Nithya and Wim have been elected to these positions by board vote.

The Linux Foundation’s mission is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open collaboration to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. It expands the open collaboration communities it supports with community efforts focused on building open standards, open hardware and open data. The Linux Foundation is also dedicated to improving diversity in open source communities and working on processes, tools and best practices for security in open development communities.