Staff
Linux Foundation Staff
- Jim Zemlin, Executive Director
- Amanda McPherson, Vice President, Marketing and Developer Programs
- Mike Woster, COO & Vice President, Business Development
- Angela Brown, Events Director
- Jennifer Cloer, Director of Communications & Community
- Karen Copenhaver, Legal Counsel
- Andy Updegrove, Legal Counsel
- Dan Kohn, Senior Strategist
Management Team
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 the adoption of Linux and support the future of computing.
Zemlin’s career took root at Western Wireless, which had a successful IPO and was later acquired by Deutsche Telekom and renamed T-Mobile USA. He was also a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful IPO in July 2000. Other posts have included vice president of marketing at Covalent Technologies and executive director at Free Standards Group.
In his leadership role today at The Linux Foundation, Zemlin 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 new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.
Zemlin has been recognized as a top Linux and open source blogger and is widely quoted in the press on Linux and the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals. He is a regular keynote speaker at industry events such as the Atlantic Big Science Summit, OSCON, LinuxCon, Gartner Group Forums, and TEDx, among others. Zemlin 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. Read Zemlin's weblog.
Amanda McPherson
Vice President, Marketing and Developer Programs
Amanda McPherson is a founding management team member of the Linux Foundation. She is responsible for content, web strategy, events, public relations and developer programs, including the Linux Developer Network. Highlights of her work with the Linux Foundation include: defining the initial brand and positioning of the organization, creating the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and authorizing multiple content pieces, including the "Who Writes the Linux Kernel" white paper. She has been involved in open source for the past eight years. Most recently, Amanda was director of marketing for the Free Standards Group, the certification and standardization authority for Linux. Prior to that she was director of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leading provider of Apache Web server software. Previously, she served at two of the industry's largest public relations and marketing agencies -- Cunningham Communication and Burson-Marsteller -- where her work was recognized by an industry award from the Public Relations Society of America. She was a core member of the marketing team responsible for the launch of the Java programming language in 1995. A published fiction author, Amanda graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Read Amanda's weblog.
Mike Woster
COO & Vice President, Business Development
Mike Woster is the head of worldwide business development for the Linux Foundation expanding industry and corporate end user participation in the Linux platform and community. Woster most recently served as global account executive at Intel. Prior to that, he held a variety of roles in product marketing, customer marketing, and channels sales in the US and Europe. Both on the job and in his free time as a long time Linux user and advocate, Woster has helped major corporations, schools and small business migrate from proprietary operating systems to Linux. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. In his spare time, he serves as a director on a non-profit financial endowment board.
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 fifteen years, primarily in the IT sector. She 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, the Pan Pacific San Francisco and with OpenDoor Events.
Jennifer Cloer
Director of Communications & Community
Jennifer Cloer is responsible for managing communications - including public relations, social media and content - for The Linux Foundation. Cloer was previously vice president at Page One PR where she ran The Linux Foundation account since 2005. She also managed the launches of the nonprofit Software Freedom Law Center and the Open Solutions Alliance and headed public relations programs for Creative Commons, Funambol, Google and Jaspersoft, among others. Prior to joining Page One PR, she was at The Metropolitan Group where she worked on media relations programs for sustainably responsible businesses in Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. Cloer also spent four years as a PR manager in corporate communications at Tektronix where she led PR for the mobile test business lines and won a Corporate Excellence Award for her role in launching a new product category for the company. A former legislative aide, she holds a BA in journalism from the University of Oregon.
Karen Copenhaver
Legal Counsel
Karen Copenhaver is 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. Most recently, Copenhaver was executive vice president and general counsel at Black Duck Software, Inc.
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 80 worldwide standard setting, open source, promotional and advocacy consortia over the past 20 years. He has also represented hundreds of both emerging as well as established technology companies, and is the founder and editor of both the popular website http://www.consortiuminfo.org and the widely-read Standards Blog
Dan previously worked as a general partner at Skymoon Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm in Palo Alto. He was the CEO of Pedestal Networks, an innovative DSL equipment company that was later acquired by UT Starcom. He also founded Habeas, an email accreditation and reputation company that helps legitimate mailers ensure delivery, and continues to serve on their board. Dan previously helped manage several telecoms firms controlled by Craig McCaw, including XO Communications, Nextel, ICO, and Teledesic. He started his career as founder and CEO of NetMarket, which set up the first music CD store, built the first commercial database-backed website, and conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994. Dan received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Computer Science from the Honors program of Swarthmore College, and studied at Exeter and the London School of Economics.
International Directors
Noriaki Fukuyasu
Director of Linux Foundation Japan Operations
Noriaki Fukuyasu is the Director of Japan Operations for The Linux Foundation. Prior to joining The Linux Foundation, he lead the international business for a Japanese leading linux distributor, Turbolinux, Inc, as Director of International Business. He also served as the CEO of Zend Japan. He has a MA degree in International Relations from Nagoya University, and a BS from Lambuth University.
Daniel Cho
Director of Linux Foundation Korea
Mr. Daniel Cho is a pioneer in Software application, database R&D. His extensive career includes Samsung Corporation as a senior software engineer, Director for Samsung SDS division in France. His excellent track records & expertise integrating technology to sales & marketing lead to re‐location to the US to spearhead Samsung SDS division as Sales and Marketing Director.
Later he was selected to head Haansoft Inc. as a Senior Executive to increase reliability of its family of software applications and its hardware partners to double digit sales revenue increases within few years. (Kosdaq) Founding member of Asianux – Number 1 market share in Korea – a Linux O/S.
Currently Mr. Daniel Cho serves as the Director of Linux Foundation of Korea. He earned his BA of Computer Science in AJOU University as well as an MBA. Additionally, he was selected and earned his CEO recognition at KAIST.
Fellows
Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and oversaw open source development of the widely-used Linux operating system.
Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
An avid computer programmer, Linus authored many gaming applications in his early years. After purchasing a personal computer with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum for use as a teaching tool. Torvalds started work on a new kernel, later to be named "Linux", in the fall of 1991 and after forming a team of volunteers to work on this new kernel, released V1.0 in the spring of 1994.
In 1996, Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit the California headquarters of Transmeta, a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving central processing unit (CPU). Torvalds then accepted a position at Transmeta and moved to California with his family. Along with his work for Transmeta, Torvalds continued to oversee kernel development for Linux.
In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers that maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, KroahHartman will continue his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment. He will also work more closely with Linux Foundation members, workgroups, Labs projects (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/labs), and staff on key initiatives to advance Linux.
Kroah-Hartman created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE. Kroah-Hartman is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, a member of The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board, has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development
Till Kamppeter holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics and works with printing under Linux and Unix already since mid 2000 when he got invited to work as a developer at MandrakeSoft (now Mandriva) in Paris. There he did the packaging of the printing-related software for the distribution and since 2001 he was the leader of the linuxprinting.org project. He was also participating in the work of the OpenPrinting workgroup. Mid 2006 he got invited to work for the Free Standards Group (now The Linux Foundation) merging linuxprinting.org into OpenPrinting and leading the OpenPrinting project full-time.
During all the time from mid 2000 to now Kamppeter has given several printing-related talks and tutorials on conferences, organized booths on Linux shows, and wrote articles in magazines about Linux. From 2006 on he is organizing an annual three-day OpenPrinting Summit, currently together with the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. With OpenPrinting he leads the development of new printing architectures and technologies and printing infrastructure and interface standards for Linux and Unix-style operating systems. For this he is in contact with the leading printer manufacturers, all relevant free software projects, and the distribution vendors.
Richard is a developer and maintainer of the OpenEmbedded software project, and architect and maintainer of the Yocto Project and Poky Build System. Most recently he was an Embedded Linux Architect for Intel's Open Source Technology Center. From 2005 to 2008, he was a Software Engineer at OpenedHand, where he worked with a variety of other open source projects such as Clutter, X server, Zaurus and Oprofile. He has also made numerous contributions to the Linux kernel, including as maintainer of the backlight and LED subsystems. Purdie received his MSci in Physics from University of Durham in 2003.
Janina is the Executive Chair of the Accessibility workgroup.
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