From 'Titanic' to 'Awesome' - Open Source Continuity In Practice

Simon Phipps is the Chief Strategy Officer at access management startup ForgeRock. He has engaged at a strategic level in the world’s leading technology companies, working in roles such as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the 80s, on collaborative conferencing software in the 90s, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. A Director of the Open Source Initiative, he takes an active interest in Free and Open Source software, serving at OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and OpenSPARC, and is a widely read thought-leader.

In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the Java platform, Solaris UNIX, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s portfolio, all under open source licenses. An outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) for businesses and governments, he has been an advisor to local and national government agencies across Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America as they have devised and implemented strategies around Free and Open Source software.

He holds a BA in electronic engineering and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.com

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