OSDL Forms New Technical Advisory Board

BEAVERTON, Ore., March 22 /PRNewswire/-- The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux(R), today announced the formation of a new Technical Advisory Board (TAB). The advisory board is comprised of leading Linux and open source software developers who will advise OSDL on technical requirements and issues important to the greater development community.

"It is important for OSDL to foster the Linux and open source development communities," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. "The Technical Advisory Board extends our involvement with the community beyond sponsoring Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton and other key developers. We look to this new board to better help guide us in dedicating resources and people towards the most important issues and technical requirements facing the development community."

The TAB members will be elected by Linux Kernel Summit attendees each July in Ottawa, Canada. Board members will serve two years, with half of the 10- member board up for election each year. The inaugural members of the new OSDL Technical Advisory Board include: -- James Bottomley, OSDL board member, vice president and chief

technology officer at SteelEye and Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer;

-- Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering at Oracle and Linux VM

tester;

-- Randy Dunlap, principal developer at Oracle and Linux kernel

maintainer;

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman, senior engineer, SuSE Labs, and Linux USB

subsystem maintainer;

-- Christoph Lameter, technical lead at Silicon Graphics, Inc.;

-- Matt Mackall, Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) fellow and

Linux Tiny maintainer;

-- Theodore Ts'o, senior engineer at IBM and Linux filesystem

maintainer;

-- Arjan van de Ven, Linux kernel generalist; and

-- Chris Wright, senior engineer at Red Hat and Linux security module

maintainer. The TAB will meet monthly and initially focus on nurturing the Linux and open source development communities by improving communication between the community and vendors, increasing the participation of vendors in open source projects, and formalizing relationships across OSDL constituencies. The TAB will also have representation on the OSDL board of directors with the recent election of James Bottomley to the OSDL board.

"OSDL has served an important role as an advocate for Linux and in bringing together users and vendors over the past five years," said James Bottomley, chair of the OSDL TAB and CTO at SteelEye. "We're pleased that the Technical Advisory Board can add more community developer involvement to OSDL, and I look forward to working with my fellow community members to provide OSDL with insight on how we can all better advance Linux and open source software." About Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)

OSDL -- sponsor of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel -- is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux-based operating systems in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of major Linux customers and IT industry leaders, OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities available to developers around the world. With offices in China, Europe, Japan and the United States, OSDL sponsors legal and development projects to advance open source software as well as initiatives for Linux systems in telecommunications, in the data center and on enterprise desktops. Visit OSDL on the Web at http://www.osdl.org/ . NOTE: OSDL is a trademark of Open Source Development Labs, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.