I am Chief Strategy Officer at Huawei Technologies, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, and leading strategy across Huawei’s businesses which span from chipsets to consumer devices to ICT infrastructure to Cloud and AI. In the last several years, I have especially focused on helping Huawei engage globally and strategically across open source.
Prior to joining Huawei, I worked at Red Hat for 15 years in the US, from where I originally come.
More broadly, I also serve and have served on a variety of open source boards and other open source organization leadership roles, including at Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation, OpenUK, Software Heritage Foundation, etc. I am a frequent keynote speaker at various events around the world and have been consistently cited as one of the most influential people in cloud computing for more than 10 years.
I have spent the entirety of my career in open source, including:
I started as an open source developer across a variety of open source web and middleware projects, including as an Apache committer
• I built, acquired, and/or led a wide range of products and businesses spanning many diverse open source projects, such as Linux, JBoss, Eclipse IDE, Kubernetes, etc.
• I have worked with many customers and partners around the world to help them in their open source journey
• I helped build a strategic partnership between Eclipse Foundation in Europe and OpenAtom Foundation in China to cooperate around the OpenHarmony open source project and ecosystem, the first time two different open source foundations have collaborated on a shared ecosystem
How will you contribute to the board
I hope to help build and strengthen the OSI in a few key areas:
• Increase participation and representation in Asia. Despite Asia being one of the top participants in open source, there are relatively few Asian OSI members and no board members from Asia. Did you know that the OSI cannot even currently process payments to accept members from China?
• Evolving to meet the needs of a changing technology and regulatory landscape. Whether to deal with challenging issues around cloud and AI, new government regulations and policies, or security, the OSI as an organization needs to grow and evolve to meet the increasingly complex needs of open source
• Increased leadership in the overall open source community. As the overall stewards of the open source definition, the OSI needs to play a stronger role in shaping the overall direction, discussions, and ecosystems around open source for the shared benefit of all. For example, the OSI can take leadership in initiatives such as the Open Source Congress
Why you should be elected
I believe that in today’s complex, fragmented world, open source is one of the best ways to build trust, cooperation, and shared benefits for all people. As an American living in Hong Kong, working in Mainland China, and traveling to Europe up to half of each year, I have a uniquely broad and global perspective and experience in open source. Based on this, I have been working hard—with a proven track record—to build bridges through open source around the world.
Additionally:
• I would be the first board member based in Asia and could help strengthen the OSI’s participation from and engagement with Asia
• I have strong business and industry experience around open source. I can help connect the value of the OSI and open source to key business and industry stakeholders
• I have strong connections and many leadership roles in the broader open source community
• Although not a lawyer, I have a diversity of experience around legal, regulatory, and IP issues. Early in my career, I personally applied for US export licenses for products with cryptographic open source libraries and clearly remember the days when open source was not universally accessible. I have purchased open source companies, led partnership deals, and created new open source business strategies, working closely with various lawyers around IP and legal due diligence. I worked closely with our policy teams in Europe around open source strategy and policy for regulations such as the CRA, AI Act, DMA, etc. And, I happen to be married to an IP lawyer, demonstrating I can get along well with them. 😉