Staff
Management Team
Jim Zemlin
Executive Director
Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin is an adviser on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union. Keep track of Jim's thoughts on his blog: http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/jzemlin/.
Dan Kohn Chief Operating Officer
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.
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. Her work blog can be found at http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/.
Mike Woster
Director of 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.
Takashi Kunai
Director of Linux Foundation Japan
An industry veteran from FUJITSU and former board member for OSDL, Takashi Kunai today is Linux Foundation's director of Japan. Prior to joining Linux Foundation, Kunai-san spent more than 30 years with FUJITSU where he led open source development for both Linux and UNIX. Most recently, Kunai-san led the Business Development Forum at the Japan OSS Promotion Forum from 2004 through 2005. He has also played an important role in the OSDL Systems Integrator (SI) Forum. Kunai-san holds a Bachelor's Degree in Faculty of Science from Kyoto 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.
Theodore Ts'o
Fellow and Chief Technology Officer
Theodore Ts'o was the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and organizes the Annual Linux Kernel Developer's Summit, which brings together the top 75 Linux Kernel Developers from all over the world for an annual face-to-face meeting. He was a founding board member of the Free Standards Group, and was chair of that organization until it merged with OSDL to form the Linux Foundation. He is one of the core maintainers for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is the primary author and maintainer for e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2/3/4 filesystems. At IBM, Theodore served as the architect for the Real-Time Linux development team.
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
Legal Counsel
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
Fellows
Linus Torvalds
Fellow
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 Tannenbaum 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.
