Simon Phipps at the Wikimedia Foundation office in April 2018

Simon Phipps is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

and

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

advocate. Phipps was instrumental in IBM's involvement in the

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run anywh ...

, founding IBM's Java Technology Center. He left IBM for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

in 2000, taking leadership of Sun's open source programme from

Danese Cooper Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of open source software. Career Cooper has managed teams at Symantec and Apple Inc. For six years, she served as chief open source "evangelist" for Sun Microsystems befo ...

. Under Phipps, most of Sun's core software was released under open source licenses, including Solaris and

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

. Phipps was not hired into

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

as part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems and his final day was March 8, 2010 when the two entities combined. Following Sun, he spent a year as

Chief Strategy Officer A chief strategy officer (CSO) is an executive that usually reports to the CEO and has primary responsibility for strategy formulation and management, including developing the corporate vision and strategy, overseeing strategic planning, and leading ...

of identity startup

ForgeRock ForgeRock, Inc. is a multinational identity and access management software company headquartered in San Francisco, U.S.A. with offices in Bristol, London, Grenoble, Vancouver (USA), Oslo, Munich, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. The ForgeRock Ident ...

before becoming an independent consultant. In 2015 he briefly joined

Wipro Wipro Limited (formerly, Western India Palm Refined Oils Limited) is an Indian multinational corporation that provides information technology, consulting and business process services. Thierry Delaporte is serving as CEO and managing direct ...

Technologies as director of their open source advisory practice. Phipps was President of the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation, with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The organization wa ...

until 2015 when he stepped down in preparation for the end of his Board term in 2016, and was re-elected in 2017 and re-appointed President by the Board in September 2017. He is also currently a board member of the

Open Rights Group The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues and by fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns on numerous issues including m ...

and The Document Foundation and on the advisory board of

Open Source for America Open Source for America (OSFA) consortium of various organizations established to advocate for and support the use of free and open-source software in the U.S. Federal government. It consists of various open source foundations, and companies, incl ...

. He has served on a number of advisory boards for other projects, including as CEO of the

MariaDB Foundation MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

, and at the

GNOME Foundation GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME project. Purpose The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platfo ...

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around t ...

OpenJDK OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GPL-2.0-only w ...

, and

OpenSPARC OpenSPARC is an open-source hardware project started in December 2005. The initial contribution to the project was Sun Microsystems' register-transfer level (RTL) Verilog code for a full 64-bit, 32- thread microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T1 processor ...

and most recently the AlmaLinux OS Foundation. He has appeared as a guest and occasional co-host on episodes of the

FLOSS Weekly FLOSS Weekly is a free and open-source software ( FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features interviews with prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hoste ...

podcast.

References

External links

Simon Phipps personal blog

Meshed Insights Business Information
(consultancy site) {{DEFAULTSORT:Phipps, Simon People in information technology Free software programmers Living people Java platform LibreOffice Sun Microsystems people Members of the Open Source Initiative board of directors Open source people Year of birth missing (living people)