A well-known and respected leader in the Free software community, computer industry veteran Simon Phipps has been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies. He has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. He was a founding Director of the Open Mobile Alliance. 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, coordinating 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 full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses. Today he is Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock, an independent software vendor devoted to true open source development of identity, integration and interaction software. He takes an active interest in several Free and Open Source software organisations, serving as a Director of the Open Source Initiative and on the advisory boards of Open Source for America,  OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and OpenSPARC.

SESSIONS

Open Communities  - 30 September - 11.00-16.00

Open Source Marketing- 1 October - 11.00-16.00