Simon Phipps
President, Open Source Initiative

Simon Phipps has engaged at a strategic level in the world’s leading technology companies, starting in roles such as field engineer, programmer, systems analyst and more recently taking executive leadership roles around open source. He worked with OSI standards in the 80s, on collaborative conferencing software in the 90s, helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM and was instrumental in open sourcing the whole software portfolio at Sun Microsystems.

As President of the Open Source Initiative and a director of the UK’s Open Rights Group, he takes an active interest in digital rights issues and is a widely read commentator at InfoWorld, Computerworld and his own Webmink blog.

He holds a BSc in electronic engineering and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Open Forum Academy.