Leadership | Linux Foundation

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Tim Bird is a longtime Linux kernel developer, with over 25 years experience with the Linux kernel and open source community. He is a principal software engineer and general Open Source technologist at Sony Corporation. Over the last 2 decades he has been involved with many projects in the Linux Foundation and other trade associations to enhance Linux for use in embedded and consumer electronics products. Tim is the founder of the Embedded Linux Conference and the elinux wiki. He recently served on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, and was previously the CTO of Lineo, an early embedded Linux company.
Erica Brescia is the COO at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, she was the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bitnami. Erica has been a dedicated builder of diverse, globally distributed technology and business teams, and has been featured as a keynote speaker at OpenStack Summit and OSCON. To further those goals, Bitnami founded the Bitnami Bootcamp, which provides free education and training on cloud, open source, and containers, for recent college graduates and self-taught technologists living southern Spain. As a YC Founder, Erica is also an active mentor of aspiring entrepreneurs in the technology and related industries, as well as being an angel investor in a number of early stage startups.
Kimberly Craven is the head of the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat, where she leads a team of open source experts focused on guiding the company, its customers and partners, and communities in which they’re engaged on open source strategy, processes, and best practices. Kimberly is a believer in the power of open source to drive positive change and is passionate about helping others get involved in the community. In her spare time, you can find her skiing and hiking with her family in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
With over two decades of experience in open source, Eileen has led complex discussions with governmental organizations, including the European Commission, various European National Competition Authorities, and members of the European Parliament. While at Hewlett Packard, she served as Vice President of its Open Source Program Office, where she developed and implemented the company’s open source strategy.
Melissa E. Evers is vice president in the Intel Architecture, Graphics, and Software group and general manager of Software Business Strategy at Intel Corporation. Her responsibilities span guiding the strategy and defining software strategies across Intel collaborating with teams and business units. Her team builds tools, insights, systems and processes to ensure our software initiatives drive maximum impact to Intel’s business. Based in Portland, Oregon, Evers leads Intel’s open source software coordination, strategy and engagement in our associated communities. Outside of Intel, she is a member of the Linux Foundation board and serves as governing board chair of LF Edge, an umbrella project within the Linux Foundation.
Before assuming her current Intel role in 2019, Evers worked across the system software stack in open source communities, from device to edge to cloud. She has led development in a breadth of open source development areas, including Android, Chrome, graphics, media, OpenStack, Cloud Native Computing and StarlingX. In 2017, her contributions to Chrome OS earned her an Intel Achievement Award, the company’s highest recognition. Since joining Intel in 2004, Evers has worked across engineering, finance and product management functions. Before joining Intel, she worked at Dell Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp.
Evers holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She also earned an MBA degree from the university’s McCombs School of Business. An active champion of diversity and inclusion, as well as a certified coach, Evers frequently coaches leaders internally and externally. She is also a frequent keynote speaker at industry events.
Dirk is the Head of Ericsson Software Technology, leading a team of engineers working on upstream open source contributions. He brings nearly four decades of software and open source leadership, most recently as head of Verizon's Open Source Office, focused on open source governance and security. Before that, he spent six years as VMware's Chief Open Source Officer, establishing the company’s OSPO and driving its involvement in the open source community, and nearly fifteen years at Intel as Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, shaping the company's open source strategy. He began his executive career as the first CTO of SUSE Linux.Dirk has been a software developer and part of many free software and open source communities since the late 1980s, helping build and grow projects like Linux, KDE, Yocto, and most recently Subsurface and adsb.im. He has served on the boards and advisory boards of a number of open source foundations, including the Linux Foundation, KDE, GNOME, and the Free Standards Group. He holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Peixin Hou is currently serving as the Chief Architect of Open Software and Systems in the Central Software Institute, Huawei. He has been working in the software industry for over 20 years and has experience in operating systems, mobile software, media processing, and cloud computing.
Peixin started his open source journey in 2000 and is now an active strategist and evangelist in the field. He is involved in defining various key strategies on open source for Huawei and leads the company’s FOSS development in areas such as Linux and containers. He also serves as a board or steering committee member in several open source projects, such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Core Infrastructure Initiative. Peixin has also represented Huawei on the board of Linaro.
Peixin received his Ph.D. from the Unive