Leadership team

Executive Director

Jim Zemlin

Jim Zemlin’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing, and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.

Chief Technology Officer

Nirav Patel

Nirav is the Chief Technology Officer at the Linux Foundation, where he manages Product and IT functions for the organization. Nirav is a passionate technology leader who brings over fifteen of experience in Open Source, Cloud, Enterprise Architecture, FinTech, Healthcare, DevOps, and IoT experience to the Linux Foundation.

Nirav has a track record of taking great technology and turning it into a scalable, global, and most importantly marketable product. He holds an MBA and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of North Alabama.

SVP and Chief Marketing Officer

Derek E. Weeks

Raised in the heart of Silicon Valley, Derek Weeks has a deep-rooted passion for software development and innovation. His 25 year career in software includes publicly-traded, multi-billion dollar businesses, and venture-backed businesses that he helped lead from early-stage growth to unicorn status to successful acquisitions. At the Linux Foundation, Derek serves as the SVP and Chief Marketing Officer supporting technology segments including DevOps, security, containers, networking, virtualization, cloud, blockchain, IoT, big data and analytics, storage, and embedded devices. 

Prior to the Linux Foundation, Derek helped create new market categories in open source software development and security as a Vice President at Sonatype, while he also built a massive online developer education community as a co-founder of All Day DevOps. Prior to Sonatype, Weeks held global software leadership positions for software portfolios in private and public companies, including: Global 360 (acquired by OpenText), Systar (acquired by Axway), Hyperformix (acquired by CA, Inc.) and Hewlett-Packard in the US and Germany. 

Weeks has received wide recognition for his achievements in the industry where he is a regular keynote speaker, has been named to the DevOps 100 by TechBeacon, distinguished as the DevOps Evangelist of the Year by DevOps.com, and received the Industry Executive of the Year from Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC). He holds a B.S. in international business from San Jose State University.

SVP and GM of Projects

Mike Dolan

Michael Dolan is SVP and GM of Projects supporting open source projects, research, and legal programs at The Linux Foundation. He has set up and launched hundreds of open source and open standards projects covering technology segments including networking, cloud, blockchain, Internet of Things, AI/ML, security, storage, and embedded devices. Mike also runs open source legal programs for the Linux Foundation’s members’ legal counsel community which has led to collaborations on standards such as OpenChain and SPDX.

Prior to joining The Linux Foundation, he spent eight years at IBM in roles across systems, services, and software. He received an M.B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, a J.D. from Cleveland State University, and a B.S. in economics from John Carroll University. Mike is a member of the Ohio State Bar Association.

SVP and GM of Events

Angela Brown

Angela Brown manages The Linux Foundation’s global conferences, with responsibilities including market research, attendee and sponsorship acquisition, and event marketing and production. She has been producing and marketing events of all types and sizes for over 15 years, primarily in the IT sector. Angela started her career with Red Herring (fka Dasar, Inc.) in 1994, quickly taking over responsibility for the planning of their global IT conferences and C-level summits. Before coming to The Linux Foundation in 2007, she also produced conferences and events at the Sheraton LA Harbor Hotel and the Pan Pacific San Francisco, as well as for OpenDoor Events.

SVP and GM of Training and Certification

Clyde Seepersad

Clyde Seepersad is responsible for the training and certification arms of The Linux Foundation. The goal of the team is to provide high-quality training and skills development to the open source community. Over the past decade Clyde has held senior leadership positions in the education space, most recently as head of operations at 360training.com and before that as a senior executive of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a global leader in education.

Prior to his involvement in education, Clyde was a Principal at the Boston Consulting Group, a global strategic consultancy known for its cutting-edge thinking and value creation for clients. He started his career in the public sector, working within the Ministry of Finance in Trinidad and Tobago. He holds an MBA and a Masters in Economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Chief Revenue Officer

Mike Woster

Mike Woster is the Chief Revenue Officer of The Linux Foundation and was a founding executive team member. He joined the Foundation in 2008, when it had only a handful of employees.

Mike and his team have been the engine for growth and sustainability at The Linux Foundation. He has developed a unique strategy to expand the Foundation from a membership organization exclusively focused on the kernel to a high-growth business that provides strategic advice and key networking opportunities to businesses leveraging open source; delivers Linux and open source training and certification; hosts open source projects; and builds developer ecosystems for corporations and community developers. He maintains strong relationships with a vast network of technology thought leaders and C-suite executives at startups and Fortune 100s.

Mike developed and executed the organizational growth strategy and hired the executive team to scale and grow the business. He also built and operated the projects business, the training and certification business, the IT services business, oversaw finance and operations, and served as an officer of six legal entities.

Prior to joining The Linux Foundation, Mike started at Intel in 2002, when he was chosen for a highly selective management rotation program. He thrived at Intel, achieving rapid promotions and earning numerous performance awards. He rotated from assignments in Oregon, California, and Chicago, and spent a year as the Siemens Business Development Manager in Munich, Germany.

Mike earned his M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and graduated cum laude with a B.S. in computer science and honors engineering from Texas A&M University. He is an advisor and investor in multiple startup firms and previously served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association.

General Manager, CNCF

Priyanka Sharma

Priyanka was previously the director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab Inc., where she built the developer evangelism team that participates regularly in the cloud native community.

Priyanka also serves as an advisor at Heavybit Industries, an accelerator for developer products. Priyanka has contributed to several CNCF projects such as Jaeger and Vitess and was a founding team member of the OpenTracing standard. In addition, Priyanka is a leading speaker and subject matter expert on cloud native and observability and has spoken about Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, OpenTracing, Envoy, Vitess, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and more. She was a startup founder featured at TechCrunch Disrupt and started her career at Google.

Executive Director, OpenJS Foundation

Robin Ginn

Robin Ginn is the Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, the neutral home for open source JavaScript projects driving broad adoption and development of key JavaScript solutions and related technologies.

As Executive Director, Robin advances the Foundation’s mission to drive adoption and ensure sustainability in the JS and web development ecosystem.

Robin brings technology, strategic marketing and business development experience to the Foundation. Over the span of her career, Robin has led major initiatives advancing open source technologies, community development, and open standards.

Robin spent more than 10 years at Microsoft where she was at the forefront of the company’s shift to openness. She co-founded @OpenAtMicrosoft and was instrumental in Microsoft’s contribution and involvement in the Node.js Project. During her tenure at Microsoft, Robin led strategic business and marketing initiatives for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Healthcare in AI & Research. In addition, Robin was a driving force behind go-to-market strategies that introduced AI and machine learning projects commercially.

Prior to Microsoft, Robin held leadership roles at both Edelman and WE Communications and was instrumental in campaigns focused on technology policy, data privacy, corporate citizenship, and community engagement.

Robin earned her B.A. from Washington State University.

General Manager, Networking and Orchestration

Arpit Joshipura

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning networking, orchestrations, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was recently voted among the Top 5 Movers and Shakers in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source networking, orchestration & edge/IOT, including LF Networking projects (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, Akraino/Edge/IOT, etc.) as well as major industry disruptions including VNFs to CNFs (Cloud Native Network functions), 5G, AI, etc. 

Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth. He has orchestrated and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO, VP, and Engineering roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

GM, Open Source Security Foundation

Brian Behlendorf

Brian Behlendorf is the General Manager for Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity. He 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 has also served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. He was the founding CTO of CollabNet and CTO of the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Brian was a Managing Director at Mithril Capital Management LLC, a global technology investment firm.

CEO, RISC-V Foundation

Calista Redmond

Calista Redmond is the CEO of the RISC-V Foundation with a mission to expand and engage RISC-V stakeholders, compel industry adoption, and increase visibility and opportunity for RISC-V within and beyond the Foundation. Prior to the RISC-V Foundation, Calista held a variety of roles at IBM, including Vice President of IBM Z Ecosystem where she led strategic relationships across software vendors, system integrators, business partners, developer communities, and broader engagement across the industry. Focus areas included execution of commercialization strategies, technical and business support for partners, and matchmaker to opportunities across the IBM Z and LinuxOne community. Calista’s background includes building and leading strategic business models within IBM’s Systems Group through open source initiatives including OpenPOWER, OpenDaylight, and Open Mainframe Project. For OpenPOWER, Calista was a leader in drafting the strategy, cultivating the foundation of partners, and nurturing strategic relationships to grow the org from zero to 300+ members. While at IBM, she also drove numerous acquisition and divestiture missions, and several strategic alliances. Prior to IBM, she was an entrepreneur in four successful start-ups in the IT industry. Calista holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.

CTO, CNCF

Chris Aniszczyk

Chris brings more than 15 years experience as The Linux Foundation’s vice president of Developer Programs. His work is focused on working with developer community to advance open source projects at scale. Previously Chris served as Twitter’s head of open source, where he led a team of developer advocates and was responsible for Twitter’s open source engineering, strategy and culture. He has also contributed to Gentoo Linux and served on the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors and the Java Community Process Executive Committee. An engineer by trade, Chris brings a passion for both open source and community development to the organization.

Executive Director, AGL

Dan Cauchy

Dan is the General Manager of Automotive at The Linux Foundation and the Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. He is responsible for the overall management and execution of the Automotive Grade Linux collaborative project, an industry effort to build an open source automotive reference platform backed by leading car manufacturers around the world. Dan has over 22 years of experience spanning the automotive, telecom, networking, and mobile business verticals. Prior to his current position, Dan was the Vice President and General Manager of MontaVista’s Automotive Business Unit (acquired by Mentor), responsible for P&L and worldwide execution of MontaVista’s automotive software strategy, sales, marketing, products, and services. During this period, Dan served on the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance and was responsible for the creation of the GENIVI Compliance Program, a group that he chaired for its first three years, which led to the release of the GENIVI Specification, a widely adopted standard in the automotive industry. While at MontaVista, Dan previously held the position of VP of Marketing and BD, where he was responsible for the development and execution of MontaVista’s global marketing strategy, which led to an acquisition by Cavium. Based in Silicon Valley, Dan has extensive startup experience. He was the Director of Product Management at Atrica (acquired by Nokia-Siemens Networks), a carrier Ethernet equipment provider startup. Prior to Atrica, Dan was the Director of Architecture and Strategy at BlueLeaf Networks, a tunable laser optical networking startup (now Picarro). He also previously held senior management positions and engineering leadership positions at Cisco Systems, Newbridge Networks (acquired by Alcatel), and Nortel. Dan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (with a Computer Engineering major) from the University of Ottawa. He holds three patents in the areas of routing and networking, with several others pending.

Executive Director, FINOS

Gabriele Columbro

Gabriele is an open source leader and technologist at heart, having spent more than 10 years building thriving communities and delivering business value through open source. He thrives in working with open source communities to drive disruptive innovation, whether it’s for an early stage tech startup, a Fortune 500 firm, or a non profit organization.

Gabriele brings a wealth of expertise in executive and technical leadership, ranging from FinTech to enterprise collaboration, and from developer platforms to SaaS ARR business models. Previously Director of Product Management at Alfresco, Gabriele has now built the Symphony Software Foundation from the ground up, with the vision of creating a trusted arena for Wall Street to accelerate digital transformation, engaging in a new model of open source FinTech innovation. Gabriele is a PMC Member for the Apache Software Foundation and an advisor for Bankex.com. Based in San Francisco but originally from Italy, he’s a proud SSC Napoli supporter, a reggae music connoisseur and a South Park groupie.

VP, Community & Ecosystem Development

Heather Kirksey

Heather Kirksey works with the community to advance the adoption and implementation of open source NFV platforms.

Before joining The Linux Foundation, she led strategic technology alliances for MongoDB. Earlier in her career she held various leadership positions in the telecom industry, including running a partner program for CPE, doing solutions marketing for the IP division at Alcatel-Lucent, and working in business development and numerous standards activities.

While at Broadband Forum she helped create and launch TR-069; served as BroadbandHome Technical Working Group Chair; served on the Board; and oversaw collaborative activities with ATIS, 3GPP, OSGi, ITU-T, OMA, IETF, Small Cell Forum, UPnP Forum, Home Gateway Initiative, and other groups.

Heather received her master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas, Austin.

VP, Dependable Embedded Systems

Kate Stewart

Kate Stewart works with the safety, security and license compliance communities to advance the adoption of best practices into embedded open source projects.

Kate was one of the founders of SPDX, and is currently the specification coordinator. She is also the co-lead for the NTIA SBOM formats and tooling working group.   Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has launched the ELISA and Zephyr Projects among others, as well as supporting other embedded projects.

With over 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia, and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. She received her Master’s in computer science from University of Waterloo and Bachelor’s of computer science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.

Legal Counsel

Andy Updegrove

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 135 worldwide standard-setting, open source, promotional, and advocacy consortia over the past 25 years. He has also represented hundreds of both emerging and established technology companies, and is the founder and editor of the popular website http://www.consortiuminfo.org and the widely read Standards Blog.

Strategic Advisor

Karen Copenhaver

Karen Copenhaver is a strategic advisor to the Linux Foundation. She was previously 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.

GM, Blockchain Healthcare and Identity

Daniela Barbosa

Daniela Barbosa serves as General Manager Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation and as Executive Director of Hyperledger Foundation with overall strategic and operational responsibility for staff, programs, expansion and execution of Hyperledger’s mission. Daniela has more than 20 years of enterprise technology experience, including serving for four years as Hyperledger Foundation’s Vice President of Worldwide Alliances with responsibility for the member community as well as broader industry and business community outreach and overall network growth. She started her career at Dow Jones where she worked with the top global brands across various sectors, including finance, consumer and energy, to architect and deliver enterprise systems, ontologies and semantic web solutions. In the early 2000s, Daniela became involved in the early web 2.0 community helping to advance the concept of digital identity and data portability as the pathway for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications.

VP of Research

Hilary Carter

Hilary Carter is VP of Research, supporting the development of open source research projects and publications at The Linux Foundation. As a writer, researcher, and program leader, Hilary has produced decision-useful insights that broaden the understanding of emerging technologies and their impact on business, government, and society.

Hilary’s career began in financial services with experiences in corporate finance, research and analysis, and global private banking. Her career then pivoted to digital technology, where she focused on mobile communications and digital media consulting. Before joining The Linux Foundation, Hilary led the Blockchain Research Institute’s syndicated research program.

She received an MSc in Management from the London School of Economics.

CTO and GM of Products

Shubhra Kar

Read about the incredible life of our colleague Shubhra Kar here.

Shubhra is a passionate technology leader with nearly eighteen years of experience in open source, cloud, enterprise architecture, DevOps, IoT and Realtime Monitoring and Analytics. Shubhra’s career spans early stage startups to NASDAQ-listed companies generating nearly $10B+ in annual revenue. He is a bottoms up Product leader, with previous lives of developer, enterprise architect, management consultant, pre-sales director, and chief evangelist before finding his calling in product management.

He comes to the Linux Foundation from Joyent/Samsung, where as VP of Products, he ran multiple product lines – primarily services like Multi-Cloud Kubernetes, Machine Learning, Serverless and Monitoring/Analytics/Logging/Tracing. Previous to Samsung, Shubhra served as VP of Product and Marketing at startups like InfluxData (#1 Time Series platform in the world) and StrongLoop (acquired by IBM) and is also the current Marketing Chair of the Node.js Foundation. He has also held management and technical leadership positions at CA Technologies and Infosys (India’s first startup to bluechip success story).