The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has established an advisory board to increase open source community representation, it says. Ten percent of the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) consists of prominent kernel and open source software developers, charged with advising the OSDL on technical matters of importance to the greater development community, the group says.

TAB will convene each month, and will focus initially on improving communication between vendors and the development community. Other goals include increasing vendor participation in open source projects, and “formalizing relationships across OSDL constituencies,” the OSDL says.

TAB members will be elected to two year terms at the Linux Kernel Summit held in Ottawa, Canada each July, with half facing re-election each year.

Initial TAB appointees include:

• James Bottomley, OSDL board member, vice president and chief technology officer at SteelEye and Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer
• Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering at Oracle and Linux VM tester
• Randy Dunlap, principal developer at Oracle and Linux kernel maintainer
• Greg Kroah-Hartman, senior engineer, SuSE Labs, and Linux USB subsystem maintainer
• Christoph Lameter, technical lead at Silicon Graphics, Inc.
• Matt Mackall, Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) fellow and Linux Tiny maintainer
• Theodore Ts'o, senior engineer at IBM and Linux filesystem maintainer
• Arjan van de Ven, Linux kernel generalist
• Chris Wright, senior engineer at Red Hat and Linux security module maintainer

OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen stated, “[The TAB] extends our involvement with the community beyond sponsoring Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and other key developers. We look to this new board to better help guide us in dedicating resources and people towards the most important issues and technical requirements facing the development community.”

 
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