Meet our Board

Rob Savoye, Chairman of the Board
Rob Savoye is the primary developer of Gnash. He is a long-time developer for the GNU project, having worked on Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu and dozens of other free/open source software projects. He was among the first employees of Cygnus Support, which was sold to Red Hat in 2001. He began programming computers in 1977 using Fortran 4. Some of the other free software projects he has worked on include GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, and GNU/Linux. He also has been a consultant to NASA, and the Department of Transportation, and many other large organizations.

Bob Young
Founder and CEO of the online publishing company Lulu Enterprises, Bob Young is a true technology entrepreneur and open-source visionary. In 1993, Young co-founded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the open-source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat is a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft. Young’s success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week’s “Top Entrepreneurs” of 1999. In 2000, Young co-founded the Center for Public Domain, a non-profit foundation created to bolster conversation of intellectual property, patent and copyright law and the management of the public domain for the common good. Grant recipients have included the Free Software Foundation and the Future of Music Coalition.

John Gilmore
John Gilmore is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He started as a programmer, and built a fortune in several computer businesses, which he is now spending to preserve and extend civil rights for all. He co-created Cygnus Solutions, the first successful free software business; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); the Cypherpunks; the DES Cracker; much free software including GNU Tar, GNU Radio, Gnash, and the GNU Debugger; and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He's spent 35 years doing programming, hardware and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. He is a board member of numerous nonprofit and for-profit businesses.

David "Lefty" Schlesinger
David "Lefty" Schlesinger is Director of Open Source Technologies at ACCESS Co., Ltd., working principally on open source strategy and community relations, and representing ACCESS in a number of industry and community initiatives. Lefty is responsible for open source licensing compliance practices within ACCESS, and is the author of ACCESS' internal "open source best practices" curriculum. He also specializes in intellectual property issues, including licensing and patent strategy as well as acting as the administrator for ACCESS' main open source release, the "Hiker Project" (www.hikerproject.org), a suite of application service components for the development of seamlessly interoperating mobile applications.

Lefty is well-known in the open source community and is a frequent presenter and panelist at open source-related conferences, participating in 2007 at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, GUADEC, and a variety of other venues. He is currently the chair of the Linux Foundation's Mobile Working Group and acting chair of the Linux Phone Standards Forum Architectural Working Group, as well as a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board

BDale Garbee
By day, BDale serves as Chief Technologist for HP's Open Source & Linux Organization. He helps to ensure that Linux works well on HP computer systems, and contributes to other Open Source projects HP is involved in.

On nights and weekends, he hacks under the name Garbee and Garbee.

Many of BDale's "spare nanoseconds" are consumed working on the Debian project, to which he's been a contributor since 1995, including serving as Project Leader in the past. In addition to working on Debian directly, BDale also serves as President of Software in the Public Interest, which is a non-profit umbrella organization providing services to Debian and other projects.

His most frequent "spare time" activities involve various facets of Amateur Radio. KB0G is his current callsign, previously he was N3EUA and before that he was KA3ORU. He's a life member of AMSAT, President of CODE, a former Vice-President of TAPR, a past Chairman and member of the Technical Committee of the Pikes Peak FM Association, and a member of the ARRL. He is also one of the developers of the RUDAK digital communications processor. BDale's primary focus on the RUDAK team is communication with the other experiment modules that RUDAK talks to over the CAN bus... SCOPE, MONITOR, CEDEX, and the thermistor SmartNode boards.

While BDale was "born and raised" in the era of 4.1BSD, shared a Vax 11/750 with Eric Crane at CMU, and has run some flavor of BSD on at least one machine ever since (the Symmetric S/375, a uVax2, BSD/OS, and NetBSD on a pc532), he have become a strong supporter of Linux, particularly the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, because of the emphasis on perpetual free availability of all of the source code to the system. He's contributed a few packages to the Debian effort, and now maintains a significant number, including some that are essential packages in the base distribution, and some that are "big hairy monsters". At least it keeps him off the streets at night...