Salt Lake City, UT — (press release excerpt) — Lineo, Inc. today announced the appointment of Matt Harris as Lineo CEO. Harris will assume this position formerly held by Lineo founder Bryan Sparks. Harris formerly held the position of Lineo COO and was directly responsible for all of Lineo's internal operations. He has extensive experience in finance, management, software engineering and law.

Before assuming the position of COO in Jan. 2001, Harris ran Lineo's mergers and acquisitions group, from Nov. 1999 to Jan. 2001. Harris joined Lineo in 1999 and was a core contributor to Lineo's emergence and growth as a leading provider of embedded operating system technologies, products and services. He has been active in the Linux community, frequently addressing technical and legal issues surrounding open source technologies
and licenses.

Harris' prior experience includes five years as a systems engineer for Electronic Data Systems, during which time he managed numerous large development efforts. Harris also practiced law for six years with Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe, representing a variety of technology companies including Aldus Corporation and Sun Microsystems. Harris was a founding partner of the Summit Law Group, a nationally recognized law firm with a strong technology law practice. Harris is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and has a bachelor of arts in finance from the University of Washington.

“Lineo's solid foundation and broad technology assets are a credit to Bryan's original vision of the embedded software market's migration to open source,” said Matt Harris, Lineo CEO. “The near future holds expansive opportunities for embedded companies that understand how to efficiently link development efforts between open source and traditional embedded operating system technologies.”

As an operating system pioneer, Sparks founded the industry's first company built entirely on providing Linux-based solutions to the business market in 1994. He helped to advance the commercial acceptance of Linux in the IT industry, funding and proselytizing Linux projects and commercial application ports that connected the open source community to ISVs and corporate customers.

In 1996, Sparks oversaw the acquisition of DR DOS from Novell and the creation of a thin clients company that aggressively created software solutions for the embedded market. In 1999, this company became Lineo, Inc. and expanded its focus on open source, including Linux, as well as hard real time, DSP and multi-core embedded operating system technologies.

 
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