When the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group merged to form the Linux Foundation, one important unanswered question was: who would set the new organization's course? On March 27, that question was answered with the announcement of the group's new board of directors.

The Linux Foundation board, the group stated, is a diverse group that represents the key stakeholders from every corner of the Linux ecosystem: the Linux kernel community, Linux vendors, distributions and users, as well as individual open source leaders. The management team and founding members of the Linux Foundation took pains to organize the board so that the multiple Linux voices would help guide the organization.

“It is essential that the Linux Foundation's board bring every Linux constituency's issues and opportunities to the table,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation in a statement. “With leadership from the kernel, legal, user, distro and vendor communities, the Linux Foundation synthesizes the top priorities of its diverse constituencies to provide services that move Linux even further ahead in today's competitive market. We have ensured that a diversity of interests is represented on our board.”

That said, the Linux Foundation's new 15-member board is made up mostly of executives from multi-billion dollar companies. For example, Tim Golden, senior VP of the Bank of America; Dan Frye, IBM's VP of Open Systems Development; and Hisashi Hashimoto, the Hitachi section manager who oversees workstations and mainframes. The board doesn't include representatives from purely community-based Linux organizations such as Debian.

The Linux Foundation board of directors also includes numerous members from outside the U.S. For example, Tsugikazu Shibata, senior manager at NEC, and Masahiro Date, general manager at Fujitsu, are both from Japan; Markus Rex, Novell's CTO of the Linux and Open Source Group is from Germany; and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, is from South Africa.

On the more technical side, James Bottomley is CTO at SteelEye Technology Inc. He is also an active member of the open source community who maintains Linux's SCSI subsystem, MCA subsystem, Linux Voyager port, and the 53c700 driver. He will serve as the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board representative. Wim Coekaerts, Linux VM (virtual machine) tester and director of Linux engineering at Oracle oversees Unbreakable Linux and works on Linux's OCFS (Oracle Cluster File System).

In a Linux world where legal issues are becoming unavoidable, the new board also includes Andrew Updegrove, co-founder and partner of the Boston-based law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Updegrove is well known as a legal expert on open standards and how they relate to open source and IP.

The other Linux Foundation board members include: Doug Fisher, VP of Intel's Software and Solutions Group; Hisashi Hashimoto, a section manager at Hitachi; Christine Martino, VP of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization; Marc Miller, AMD's open source software expert; Brian Pawlowski, VP and CTO for NetApp; and Christy Wyatt, Motorola's VP for Mobile Devices' Ecosystem and Market Development.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux's growth. The group sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation's main goals are to promote, protect, and standardize Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

 
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