Brian Behlendorf

Hyperledger

Brian Behlendorf was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. He has also served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. He was the founding CTO of CollabNet and CTO of the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Behlendorf was a managing director at Mithril Capital Management LLC, a global technology investment firm.

Dan Cauchy

The Linux Foundation

Dan is the General Manager of Automotive at The Linux Foundation and the Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. He is responsible for the overall management and execution of the Automotive Grade Linux collaborative project, an industry effort to build an open source automotive reference platform backed by leading car manufacturers around the world. Dan has over 22 years of experience spanning the automotive, telecom, networking, and mobile business verticals. Prior to his current position, Dan was the Vice President and General Manager of MontaVista’s Automotive Business Unit (acquired by Mentor), responsible for P&L and worldwide execution of MontaVista’s automotive software strategy, sales, marketing, products, and services. During this period, Dan served on the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance and was responsible for the creation of the GENIVI Compliance Program, a group that he chaired for its first three years, which led to the release of the GENIVI Specification, a widely adopted standard in the automotive industry. While at MontaVista, Dan previously held the position of VP of Marketing and BD, where he was responsible for the development and execution of MontaVista’s global marketing strategy, which led to an acquisition by Cavium. Based in Silicon Valley, Dan has extensive startup experience. He was the Director of Product Management at Atrica (acquired by Nokia-Siemens Networks), a carrier Ethernet equipment provider startup. Prior to Atrica, Dan was the Director of Architecture and Strategy at BlueLeaf Networks, a tunable laser optical networking startup (now Picarro). He also previously held senior management positions and engineering leadership positions at Cisco Systems, Newbridge Networks (acquired by Alcatel), and Nortel. Dan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (with a Computer Engineering major) from the University of Ottawa. He holds three patents in the areas of routing and networking, with several others pending.

Dirk Hohndel

VMware

Dirk is VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, leading the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank. Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. He currently is a member of the Board of the Linux Foundation. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Greg Kroah-Hartman

The Linux Foundation

Greg is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment.

Jim Zemlin

The Linux Foundation

Jim's career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux. At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry. Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.

Kelsey Hightower

Google

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.

Linus Torvalds

Linux Creator

Linus was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history.In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system. Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry.In 2005, citing a lack of free and open source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Today Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management, and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture.In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others.Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Michelle Noorali

Microsoft Azure

Michelle is a Sr. Software Engineer at Microsoft Azure and a core maintainer of the Kubernetes Helm project. She co-cofounded the special interest group in Kubernetes that focuses on running and managing workloads in Kubernetes (SIG-Apps) and serves on the Kubernetes Steering Committee. Michelle is primarily a Go developer but has Ruby roots and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Georgia.

Mitchell Hashimoto

HashiCorp

Mitchell Hashimoto is a passionate engineer, professional speaker, and entrepreneur. Mitchell has been creating and contributing to open source software for almost a decade. He has spoken at dozens of conferences about his work, such as VelocityConf, OSCON, FOSDEM, and more. Mitchell is the founder of HashiCorp, a company whose goal is to make the best DevOps tools in the world, including Vagrant. Prior to HashiCorp, Mitchell spent five years as a web developer and another four as an operations engineer.