Schedule - PGDay.EU 2010
Simon Phipps
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. Today he takes an active interest in Free and Open Source software organisations, including the advisory boards of OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC and GNOME, 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. In that role he has overseen 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 portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses. He has also been an outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) for businesses and governments. Most recently 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 degree in electronic engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.net