GNOME hires Stormy Peters as Executive Director

The GNOME Foundation Aims to Attract New Users and Developers, Grow Project, and Give the World a Free and Open Source Desktop that Rocks

Istanbul, Turkey, July 7, 2008: The GNOME Foundation today announced the hiring of Stormy Peters as Executive Director. Stormy, a well-known industry analyst with extensive experience at Hewlett Packard and OpenLogic, will work on accelerating the adoption of GNOME and strengthening the Foundation by attracting new industry members and community contributors. “Hiring Stormy represents a major step for GNOME”, said Luis Villa, a Director of the GNOME Foundation. “With her unique background and experience, she’ll be a natural at growing industry support for the project and connecting interested parties to our community.”

Stormy’s combination of industry expertise and community background will be a great fit for GNOME. “Stormy is one of the most well respected members of the open source industry and community.” says Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, “Her unique ability to work with both community volunteers and commercial industry members across a variety of open source projects will serve the GNOME Foundation well.”

The GNOME community has an active global developer base and industry players focused on providing an easy to understand user experience on PCs and mobile devices. The past year there has seen tremendous growth in the number of devices that ship with GNOME- mass-market laptops, phones, and even GPS devices. Hiring Stormy as executive director will help GNOME capitalize on this momentum, exactly at a time when more of the world is realizing the value of combining free and open source software with great user experiences, while also helping GNOME consolidate its traditional strengths in enterprise and other large-scale deployments.

Stormy has also been involved in the GNOME community for a long time, having been one of the founding members of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board in 2000. She has remained involved with GNOME since then, keynoting the GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) in England in 2007. Stormy is enthusiastic about joining the GNOME Foundation full time. “I’m very excited to have the chance to help the GNOME community show the world how the GNOME desktop is changing the future of computing.” Stormy will continue in an advisory role at OpenLogic.

Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun and GNOME Foundation Advisory Board Member says, “As a key supporter of GNOME, especially in connection with OpenSolaris, Sun is delighted to welcome Stormy to her new position. It is extremely gratifying to see the GNOME Foundation grow to the point where it needs an Executive Director to drive additional industry support and further increase adoption of GNOME. We look forward to working with Stormy in her new role to help her achieve this goal.”

About Stormy Peters

Stormy Peters joins the GNOME Foundation from OpenLogic where she founded and managed their OpenLogic Expert Community. Previously, Stormy worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office where she was responsible for HP’s open source strategy, policy and business practices. Stormy joined HP as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.

Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business aspects of Open Source Software at major conferences such as the Open Source Business Conference and the O’Reilly conferences, as well as government organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. Stormy is involved in GNOME and free and open source software because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart, passionate people!

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME desktop is a free, easy to use, accessible and internationalized desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems used by millions. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and small business and home users. GNOME also includes a complete development environment which provides the core platform for thousands of applications.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME, comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap. The GNOME Foundation is supporting the pursuit of Software Freedom through the innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. It’s a fun and inviting community, so if you’re reading this and wondering what you can do to help promote Software Freedom, contributing to GNOME is a great way to start! More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.

GNOME Foundation sponsoring members include Access, Canonical, Debian, the Free Software Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Igalia, Imendio, Intel, Mozilla, Nokia, Novell, OLPC, Opened Hand, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems, with legal pro bono work provided by Software Freedom Law Center and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati.

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