Mr. Simon Phipps

A computer scientist and web and open source advocate, he was instrumental in IBM's involvement in the Java programming language, founding IBM's Java Technology Center. He left IBM for Sun Microsystems in 2000, taking leadership of Sun's open source programme from Danese Cooper. Phipps was not hired into Oracle as part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems and his final day was March 8, 2010 when the two entities combined. While at Sun Microsystems, most of Sun's core software was released under open source licenses, including the Solaris operating system and the Java software platform. He is a board member of Open Source for America and the Open Source Initiative. He has served on a number of advisory boards for other projects, including the GNOME Foundation, OpenSolaris,OpenJDK, and OpenSPARC. He appeared as a guest on episodes 39 and 113 of FLOSS Weekly and as a host on episode 124. He is presently Chief Strategy Officer of ForgeRock.