Linux Foundation Europe Advisory Board

Philipp Ahmann is Technical Business Development Manager for Open Source Software at Robert Bosch GmbH. He has more than 15 years of experience in the automotive industry. Many of those years were spent working with Linux-based platforms.

Today, Philipp interacts with numerous organizational units at Bosch that deal with embedded open source technology and IoT. These include automotive/mobile, industrial automation, smart home, power tools, building technologies, security systems and more.

He also regularly interacts with other open source embedded projects such as AGL, yocto, SPDX, Zephyr and Xen, and represents the Linux Foundation's ELISA project as chair of the technical steering committee.

Lucian is Deputy Director of R&D and Open Source Director at RTE, the French power transmission system operator. He is leading the open source strategy of RTE which aims at moving the digitalization of the power grid into a new era. Early 2018, he started a collaboration with The Linux Foundation to launch LF Energy, an open source coalition to speed technological innovation and support the energy transition across the world. Today, Lucian is deeply involved in LF Energy and serves as Chair of the Governing Board. He is also member of the LF Research Advisory Board since 2021.

Lucian has been with RTE since 2003 where he held several management positions in the fields of R&D, markets and finance.

Gabriele is an open source leader and technologist at heart, having spent more than 10 years building thriving communities and delivering business value through open source. He thrives in working with open source communities to drive disruptive innovation, whether it’s for an early stage tech startup, a Fortune 500 firm, or a non profit organization.

Gabriele brings a wealth of expertise in executive and technical leadership, ranging from FinTech to enterprise collaboration, and from developer platforms to SaaS ARR business models. Previously Director of Product Management at Alfresco, Gabriele has now built the Symphony Software Foundation from the ground up, with the vision of creating a trusted arena for Wall Street to accelerate digital transformation, engaging in a new model of open source FinTech innovation. Gabriele is a PMC Member for the Apache Software Foundation and an advisor for Bankex.com. Based in San Francisco but originally from Italy, he’s a proud SSC Napoli supporter, a reggae music connoisseur and a South Park groupie.

Debora Comparin is a Standardization Expert at Thales and the Chair of the OSIA Initiative at the Secure Identity Alliance (SIA).

She is a strong advocate for interoperable and open digital government infrastructures and in 2019 she founded the OSIA initiative, which is a public-private sector partnership aimed at building the open standard for the interoperability of national identification infrastructures. Debora oversees the initiative, guiding the open source reference implementation of OSIA, and its integration with adjacent open source government platforms.

Debora began her career as a graduate engineer at SAFRAN, where she served as the seconded representative at the Aerospace Growth Partnership (AGP), a public-private sector partnership established to secure the future of the UK aerospace sector.

She is a frequent speaker on the interplay of standardization with open source software in the context of digital government infrastructures, open standards for digital identity, and interoperability.

Debora holds an MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Padova and a Business Strategy & Consulting qualification from Imperial College.

Philippe is a seasoned tech executive and 2021 Trailblazer award-winning CTO with over 25 years of experience in connecting technology to business, driving impactful change in both large enterprises and start-ups. Having served as CTO three times in 12 years, including for Orange Business, he is currently VP of Software Engineering for Orange.

Philippe is responsible for transforming the telco to techco journey and scouting for disruptive technologies and partners. He brings advisory to CxOs and executives in their digital transformation journey, thanks to a unique 360° view of technology, culture, and innovation.

Philippe is also an advisor to investment funds, a board advisor for start-ups in tech, and a thought leader in the tech ecosystem. Passionate about open source, he is a board advisor for the Linux Foundation Europe, and he advocates for technology and transformation through keynotes, his presence on social networks, and community involvement such as Tech.Rocks.

Peter Giese is Director of SAP Open Source Program Office. Peter is focusing on refining SAP’s open source strategy, developing new tools and approaches for managing open source at scale and on further promoting inner source at SAP. Since joining SAP in 1996, Peter has held several managerial and executive positions in application and technology development. Before joining SAP, Peter worked as researcher at Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) and as development manager at Kiefer & Veittinger Software Unternehmensberatung GmbH. Peter holds a M.Sc. degree in computer science from Kaiserslautern University of Technology.

Daniel Goldscheider is the founder of the OpenWallet Foundation. Before that he was CEO of yes.com, an open banking scheme, and co-founded Mediaguide with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers as well as Aureus Private Equity.

He is a member of the Supervisory Board of Valamar Riviera d.d., Croatia’s largest tourism company and served on the board of Identity Trust Management AG and the Global Footprint Network.

Samuel Iglesias is GPU Driver Development Director at Igalia, an open-source consultancy. He leads a software development team focused on open-source user-space and kernel-space GPU drivers and X11/Wayland compositors.

Samuel has been at Igalia since 2012, where he held software development positions in the Linux kernel and user-space GPU drivers before his current role. Samuel holds both BS and MS in Telecommunications Engineering at University of Oviedo, Spain; and an MS in Research on Software Engineering and Computer System Engineering at UNED, Spain.

Max is Founder and Cloud Native Advocate at Liquid Reply. He is Co-Chair of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group, CNCF Ambassador and served 3 years at the Kubernetes release team. In his work he supports and advice enterprises on Open Source matters, how to build an open source strategy and how to contribute to projects. He focuses on designing and building cloud-native solutions on/with Kubernetes anywhere and platform engineering to simplify the current challenges of complex systems. Besides, Max organizes Kubernetes Community Days in Munich & Ukraine, and Kubernetes/Cloud Native Meetups in Munich.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as a 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. He also works closely with Linux Foundation members and projects, and on key initiatives to advance Linux.

Greg created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE.

Greg is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and a member of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. He has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development.

Anni Lai is a seasoned open-source expert who leads governance, process, compliance, training, project alignment, and ecosystem building at Futurewei. With a rich history of serving on various open-source foundation boards such as OpenStack Foundation, LF CNCF, LF OCI, LF Edge, and currently on the LF Open Metaverse Foundation board, Anni has been instrumental in growing open-source projects and communities.

With a firm belief in creating great technology through open innovation and collaboration with the global community, Anni has traveled to 30+ countries on 5 continents as an open-source technology evangelist, consultant, and strategist throughout her open-source and tech career. She has helped Futurewei significantly invest in the European market, one of the most important markets for the company. Futurewei is a founding member of the LF Europe Open Wallet Foundation, and will continue to contribute and participate in innovation projects and build open-source ecosystems for LF Europe by inviting their European partners in the open-source, standard, and telco areas to join and drive innovation and growth in the open-source space.

Gerardo Lisboa has been nto Open Source since the late 80's, following its evolution through time, engaged in promoting awareness, bringing communities together and working for a better future.

He is an engineer by heart, talent and trade, worked from the lower threads of the silicon, to the internets of the world, to finally arrive at the understanding of the information flows that make up the world.

Gerardo is curious about the entanglement of the human creativity, the collective power of the citizens, and possibilities offered by Open Source technologies.

Paolo Mainardi is founder and CTO of Sparkfabrik. His role is to drive the company toward innovation by building cutting-edge and cloud-native web applications, spreading the value of the open source, and letting the company be an active part of the community. When he is not too busy with the company, he likes to contribute to open source projects, write, speak, and organize conferences.

Sachiko Muto is the Chair of OpenForum Europe and a senior researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. She originally joined OFE in 2007 and served for several years as Director with responsibility for government relations and then as CEO. Sachiko is a co-author of “The impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy”, a study published by the European Commission in 2021. She has degrees in Political Science from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and has been a guest researcher at UC Berkeley and TU Delft

Jacopo is CEO and Founder at SIGHUP, an italian-based startup focused on Kubernetes, Cloud Native & Container technologies. He started working with Kubernetes and containers back in 2015 and over the years he fell in love with the Kubernetes community and the CNCF as a vendor-independent nexus of collaboration.

He is passionate about practical adoption of Open Source Software and Open Standards across large organizations.

Guillaume Nevicato is a cloud native passionate since 2015 around PaaS & CaaS domains. A former Cloud Practice Leader on cloud transformation, he is now involved in the network Cloud Transformation in Orange Innovation. Guillaume is Co-chairman of the Sylva open source project that aims to accelerate the Telco Ecosytem in the adoption of a common Cloud-Native Stack.

Adrian O’Sullivan is Director of Huawei Open Source Program Office in Europe where he helps direct how Huawei's Consumer, Carrier, Enterprise, Cloud & AI Businesses make use of and participate in open source projects to build the products & services to meet our customer’s needs. Adrian has a  passion for creating technology that can help solve the issues that challenge the world we live in and loves to work with diverse teams collaborating globally to achieve it.

Adrian started his open source journey like many do, by contributing code, then to committer, to roles such Project Technical Lead in the Linux Foundation ONAP project to the Steering Committee of Eclipse Foundation Oniro working group. Adrian has also driven activities to bring open source and standard communities closer together, such as being the leader of the CEN-CENELEC open source solutions business model team.

Previously Adrian worked for companies such as IBM, Dell-EMC and Motorola in a variety of Software Engineering roles and now lives in Cork Ireland.    

Timo is responsible for driving Nokia’s overall engagement in Service and Network Automation related open source. In this role Timo works across multiple industry organisations, both open source and standardization, engages with both customers and other industry players, as well as internally across all Nokia businesses.

Timo has over 25 years of experience in network systems, ranging from multivendor interoperability verification, systems architecture research, new business incubation, mobile networks and operations systems.

He’s currently engaged with multiple Linux Foundation projects, being a TSC member in Nephio, EMCO, and ONAP where he leads the Requirements subcommittee, regular to O-RAN Software Community.

Prior to joining Nokia Timo was a lecturer at his alma mater Helsinki University Computer Science department, where he focused on distributed systems and systems communications.

Alois Reitbauer works as Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace where he leads open source and research activities. He is co-chair of the CNCF TAG App Delivery and maintainer and governance board member of several open source projects.

Phil is the Head of Ericsson Software Technology (EST), where he leads a passionate group of engineers developing open source software across a wide range of projects including Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and ONAP among many others.

Prior to Ericsson, Phil was the V.P. of Operations for the Networking Projects at the Linux Foundation including ORAN, ONAP, OpenDaylight, and Anuket. In that role, Phil led a team of technical staff who oversaw community software development based on DevOps and open source best practices. Prior to the Linux Foundation, Phil spent 12 years with Hewlett Packard working on Linux and Open Source starting in 2001. There, Phil formed and led HP’s Open Source Program Office responsible for open source strategy, tools, processes, and investments as HP transitioned from Unix to Linux in the Enterprise Server market.

Sebastian Scheele is CEO and co-founder of Kubermatic, a start-up with +90 employees that is one of the committers to Kubernetes, focused on developing open core software solutions for automating Kubernetes operations, at scale. Sebastian, a developer himself, has his finger on the pulse of where the Kubernetes landscape is going and is contributing many of his team's resources to upstream K8s development. As one of the early pioneers in the cloud native ecosystem , he has helped hundreds of enterprises embrace Kubernetes to solve cutting edge challenges in both cloud and edge computing.

Sebastian speaks at numerous conferences around the world about the impact of Kubernetes and cloud native technologies for IT.

Preston Lau is the senior director of strategy & business development at Futurewei Technologies. In his current role, He is leading cross-functional strategies for AI machine learning and open source initiatives in support of the company growth in new markets & new innovative product areas. Earlier in his career, Preston worked for Google where he led Google’s strategic partnership development in the region and successfully established key relationships with renowned telecom operators and mobile manufacturers, as well as content developers to beef up Google’s service offerings around mobile, videos, maps and finance. From AI startup to billion-dollar corporations, he has accumulated 25 years of strategy & business development experience in hi-tech companies. He earned his Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Manuel Rego is a free software developer working on the Web Platform at Igalia. Over the past few years, he has been working on the implementation of different web platform features in Chromium/Blink and WebKit for which he is an owner and reviewer, respectively. Manuel is also a member of the CSS Working Group since 2017, Blink API owner since 2020 and Servo Technical Steering Committee chair since 2023.

Steve Wanless is based out of Austin, Texas, United States and works at Red Hat as RHEL Business Strategist for Infrastructure components.