Board of Directors

Sony - Gold Director

Tim Bird

Tim Bird is a longtime Linux kernel developer, with over 25 years experience with the Linux kernel and open source community. He is a principal software engineer and general Open Source technologist at Sony Corporation. Over the last 2 decades he has been involved with many projects in the Linux Foundation and other trade associations to enhance Linux for use in embedded and consumer electronics products. Tim is the founder of the Embedded Linux Conference and the elinux wiki. He recently served on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, and was previously the CTO of Lineo, an early embedded Linux company.

At-Large Director

Erica Brescia

Erica Brescia is the COO at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, she was the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bitnami. Erica has been a dedicated builder of diverse, globally distributed technology and business teams, and has been featured as a keynote speaker at OpenStack Summit and OSCON. To further those goals, Bitnami founded the Bitnami Bootcamp, which provides free education and training on cloud, open source, and containers, for recent college graduates and self-taught technologists living southern Spain. As a YC Founder, Erica is also an active mentor of aspiring entrepreneurs in the technology and related industries, as well as being an angel investor in a number of early stage startups.

Oracle

Wim Coekaerts

Wim Coekaerts is Sr. Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering for Oracle, reporting to Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven. He is responsible for managing Oracle’s Linux strategy with a dedicated focus on ensuring large enterprises can adopt Linux quickly and Linux in the Cloud. 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.

At-Large Director

Eileen Evans

Eileen Evans is the Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Redaptive, an Energy-as-a-Service provider that leverages the real-time data powered by its Data-as-a-Service submetering platform, and funds and installs energy-saving and energy-generating equipment to help companies reduce energy waste, save money, lower their carbon emissions, and meet their sustainability goals across their real estate portfolios.

Eileen has been actively engaged in the area of open source for more than two decades. She speaks regularly on open source topics and has led complex open source discussions with governmental bodies, such as the European Commission, various European National Competition Authorities, and members of the European Parliament. From 2012 through 2017, Eileen served as the Vice President of Hewlett-Packard Company’s Open Source Program Office, responsible for HP’s open source strategy and its implementation. During this time, Eileen represented HP on the Linux Foundation Board of Directors and the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors.

Prior to Redaptive, Eileen served as the Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Micro Focus International plc and a Vice President and Deputy General Counsel in the legal departments of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Hewlett-Packard Company. Eileen also served as an Associate General Counsel in the legal departments of Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Prior to her in-house roles, Eileen was in private practice at DLA Piper (formerly Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich). 

Intel

Melissa E. Evers

Melissa E. Evers is vice president in the Intel Architecture, Graphics, and Software group and general manager of Software Business Strategy at Intel Corporation. Her responsibilities span guiding the strategy and defining software strategies across Intel collaborating with teams and business units. Her team builds tools, insights, systems and processes to ensure our software initiatives drive maximum impact to Intel’s business. Based in Portland, Oregon, Evers leads Intel’s open source software coordination, strategy and engagement in our associated communities. Outside of Intel, she is a member of the Linux Foundation board and serves as governing board chair of LF Edge, an umbrella project within the Linux Foundation.

Before assuming her current Intel role in 2019, Evers worked across the system software stack in open source communities, from device to edge to cloud. She has led development in a breadth of open source development areas, including Android, Chrome, graphics, media, OpenStack, Cloud Native Computing and StarlingX. In 2017, her contributions to Chrome OS earned her an Intel Achievement Award, the company’s highest recognition. Since joining Intel in 2004, Evers has worked across engineering, finance  and product management functions. Before joining Intel, she worked at Dell Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp.

Evers holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She also earned an MBA degree from the university’s McCombs School of Business. An active champion of diversity and inclusion, as well as a certified coach, Evers frequently coaches leaders internally and externally. She is also a frequent keynote speaker at industry events.

At-Large Director / Treasurer

Frank Fanzilli

Frank Fanzilli is a seasoned software veteran and advisor 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, 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 has served on the boards of numerous technology companies. He was a founder of nLayers, Inc., a software company acquired by EMC in 2006, and a director of PeopleSoft prior to its acquisition by Oracle.

Frank holds an M.B.A in finance from New York University and a B.S. in management from Fairfield University.

GitLab, Inc - Silver Director

Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson is the Chief Technology Officer at GitLab, Inc. — the first single application for the DevSecOps lifecycle. GitLab is a free, open core software used by more than 30 million registered users to collaborate, author, test, secure, and release software quickly and efficiently. At GitLab, Eric is responsible for the organization that integrates the work of over a hundred external open source contributors into GitLab’s codebase every month. During his tenure Eric has contributed to a 10x+ increase in annual recurring revenue and has scaled Engineering from 100 to more than 550 people while dramatically increasing team diversity in gender, ethnicity, and country-of-residence. He’s also helped turn GitLab, Inc. into one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world, as evidenced by their substantial monthly on-premise releases.

Eric is also a veteran of 4 previous enterprise technology startups in fields as varied as marketing technology, localization software, streaming video, and commercial drone hardware/software. He currently advises two startups in the medical trial software and recycling robotics industries. Eric brings his open source and Linux background to the Foundation. In his professional work, he has spent 17 years hands-on or managing teams that develop software that runs on Linux systems, administrating server clusters, orchestrating containers, open-sourcing privately built software, and contributing back to open source projects. Personally, he’s also administered a Linux home server for the past ten years.

Tencent

Xin Liu

Mr. Xin Liu is the General Manager of Tencent Future Network Lab and Technical Operation Department.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

David Marr

David Marr is Vice President, Legal Counsel at Qualcomm Technologies, where he leads the open source practice and policy team. He has been practicing in the open source legal field since 1998, delivering strategic advice to organizations and providing guidance on community licensing practices. Dave writes and speaks regularly on FOSS-related issues, their interaction with standard-setting, technology transfer best practices, licensing business models, and other subjects at the intersection of law and high technology.

Prior to Qualcomm Technologies, Dave worked at Sun Microsystems, at various times supporting Java, OpenSPARC, and Solaris, as well as at Juniper Networks.

Meta

Chris Mason

Chris Mason is a longtime contributor to the Linux kernel and maintainer of the Btrfs filesystem. He is currently a software engineer on Facebook’s kernel team and the chair of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. Prior to joining Facebook, Chris worked as a kernel developer at SUSE, Oracle, and Fusion-io. He lives with his family in Rochester, New York.

Meta

Ben Maurer

Ben is a software engineer at Meta focusing on privacy and security. He joined Meta in 2010 as a member of the infrastructure team where he played a key role in driving the performance and reliability of Meta’s products. Over the course of his time at the company, Ben has worked on several technologies that Meta has open sourced, including jemalloc, Folly, Thrift, and HHVM. He has also built deep partnerships with the open source community such as bringing Restartable Sequences to the Linux kernel and building a team within Meta dedicated to contributing to open source web browsers. Ben is one of the co-creators of the Diem blockchain and led Meta’s technical contributions to the project.

Ben also worked at the White House in 2014 as part of the U.S. Digital Service where he improved the communication tools used by the President and his staff.

Before joining Meta, Ben was an engineer at Google after the company acquired the startup he co-founded, reCAPTCHA, a system that determines if a user is human while simultaneously digitizing books. Ben has also contributed to the Mono and GNOME open source projects.

Renesas - Gold Director

Hisao Munakata

Hisao Munakata, a Senior Director at Renesas, leads the company’s upstream Linux kernel development team. He also helps champion Renesas’ work on several Linux Foundation projects that support the Linux community. These include Automotive Grade Linux, the project creating open source solutions for automotive applications; the community-led Yocto Project, which has developed an embedded Linux development environment; and the Long Term Support Initiative, which is devoted to the maintenance of a common Linux base for use in consumer electronics products.

Samsung

Daniel Park

Dr. Daniel Park is a head of open source group in Samsung where he is responsible for open source strategy, corporate governance and compliance operation, project development and developer relationship and all kinds of open source stuffs. He has many experiences in terms of global standard and collaboration including W3C advisory board and working group chair, IETF working group chair, OCF vice president and open source work group chair, and currently his experience is being expanded to open source communities. He received his Ph.D from Kyung Hee University in Computer Engineering.

Chair

Nithya Ruff

Nithya A. Ruff is the Head of the Amazon Open Source Program Office. She drives open source culture and coordination inside of Amazon and engagement with external communities. Open Source has proven to be one of the world’s most prolific enabler of innovation and collaboration, and Amazon’s customers increasingly value open source innovation and the cloud’s role in helping them adopt and run important open source services. Prior to Amazon, she started and grew Comcast and Western Digital’s Open Source Program Offices. Open Source Program Offices are a critical part of a company’s digital transformation and innovation journey and enable the intentional and systematic engagement with open source for companies. 

Nithya has been director-at-large on the Linux Foundation Board for the last 5 years and in 2019 was elected to be Chair of the influential Linux Foundation Board. She works actively to advance the mission of the Linux Foundation around building sustainable ecosystems that are built on open collaboration. She is a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new and diverse people in technology and can often be seen speaking and writing on this topic. Nithya graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School and is an aspiring corporate board director and governance enthusiast.tw

Red Hat

Chris Wright

Chris Wright is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Red Hat. He leads the Office of the CTO, which is responsible for incubating emerging technologies and developing forward-looking perspectives on innovations like artificial intelligence, cloud and edge computing, distributed storage, software-defined networking and network functions virtualization, containers, automation and continuous delivery, and distributed ledgers.

During his 25 years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He also has experience in the Linux® industry on security, virtualization, and networking. Wright has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, with most of this time spent working deep in the Linux kernel. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.

Oracle

Jim Wright

James (Jim) Wright is a well known software architect and attorney who has been working in and around open source for 20 years. Jim is the author of the Universal Permissive License and has been with Oracle since 2009, where he currently serves as Chief Architect, Open Source Policy, Strategy, Compliance, and Alliances.

Prior to his time at Oracle, Jim was in private practice at Sidley Austin, where he handled a wide variety of technology transactional matters as well as patent litigation. Jim is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and in the decade before starting legal practice he worked in engineering and management capacities at a variety of different IT enterprises. When not at work, Jim enjoys traveling with his family and his service dog, Arrow, building and riding his collection of wheeled contraptions, and making, tasting, and talking about espresso.