From The Linux Foundation
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 and Member Outreach
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/.
Takashi Kunai
Director of 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.
Markus Rex
Chief Technology Officer
Markus Rex previously served as Chief Technology Officer for the Linux and Open Source Group at Novell. He was responsible for guiding the strategic direction of the technology platform and providing insight and guidance to the product development organization. Mr. Rex was a member of Novell's Worldwide Management Committee.
Mr. Rex joined Novell in February 2004 with the acquisition of SUSE LINUX, as Vice President and General Manager of the SUSE Linux Product Group. While at SUSE, which he joined in February 1999 as an engineer and became SUSE's head of development four months later, he served as vice president of Research and Development where he facilitated SUSE's growth from 15 engineers in 1999 to more than 165 in January 2004, the world's largest open source development lab. Prior to joining SUSE, Markus worked in the department of Computer Science at the University of Erlangen and as an IT consultant at Philips in Prague.
Mr. Rex studied material science at University of Erlangen.
Theodore Ts'o
Fellow and Chief Platform Strategist
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.