Simon Phipps

Instrumental in IBM's involvement in the Java programming language, Phipps founded IBM's Java Technology Center. A computer scientist and web and open source advocate, 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 has served as a board member of Open Source for America and the Open Source Initiative. Phipps has also 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. Phipps subsequently served as Chief Strategy Officer of ForgeRock.