Speakers
- Speakers in alphabetic order
Contents |
Zaheda Bhorat - Google
Zaheda Bhorat has been an Open Source advocate since managing the OpenOffice.org project and community while working for Sun Microsystems Inc. She took the project from inception to a 1.0 release. With her experience of building communities of contributers, she created one of the first open source marketing projects with a global team of passionate volunteers to promote both open source and launch the office suite. She also managed the NetBeans Open Source community and the Sun marketing team responsible for NetBeans 3.6. Zaheda lead the development and growth of online communities, in Europe, at Apple Computer in the '90s with AppleLink and eWorld, evangelizing the shift to online publishing prior to her open source work. Zaheda has 15 years software industry experience and holds a BSc in Computer Science. Zaheda has recently joined Google, managing Open Source Programs, living in London.
Owen Hughes - Oracle
Owen Hughes is Business Development Manager for technology products at Oracle Corporation. He has over 12 years experience in the IT industry working with a range of technologies in a variety of sectors. Owen holds a BSc (Hons) Computer Applications from Dublin City University as well as an MSc (Hons) Technology Management, National Institute for Technology Management, University College Dublin.
Owen will discuss 'Free Software from Oracle' and give an update/positioning on Oracle Open Source.
Ciaran O'Riordan - Free Software Foundation Europe
Ciaran O'Riordan is a brussels-based representative of Free Software Foundation Europe. His work involves participating in the legislative process on legislative issues which are relevent to Free Software. He was a founder of Irish Free Software Organisation and regularly assists collaboration of the Free Software community in the UK and Ireland.
Bruce Perens - Sourcelabs
Bruce Perens is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source community. He is creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. He's founder or co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, The Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International. Perens released his first Free Software program, Electric Fence, in 1987. He is creator of Busybox, which has spawned its own development community and is part of most commercial devices using embedded Linux.
Perens is currently a vice president at Sourcelabs. Sourcelabs are sponsoring Bruce Perens' appearance at this event. He is also a member of the board of directors of Open Source Risk Management Inc. and a major stockholder of Progeny Linux Inc.
Richard Stallman - Free Software Foundation
Richard Stallman started the Free Software movement in 1983 and is the author of the GNU General Public License. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates. He launched the development of the GNU operating system in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.
Stallman will speak about the redrafting of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history the GNU operating system.
Les Timms - Open Source Academy
Les Timms is IT Manager for the Development Directorate of Birmingham City Council. He has extensive experience in managing major IT projects, programmes, and services in both commercial and public sectors. Les also has a lead role for technical strategy within the City Council, and has most recently steered the ODPM-funded Open Source Academy project.
Les will be delivering a presentation on the Open Source Academy implementation project in Birmingham libraries. The presentation will focus on the business case for open source, the challenges that have been overcome, and the cultural, technical, and financial issues to be considered when planning an open source implementation in the government sector.