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Evaluation Committee

The Evaluation Committee evaluates projects that have applied to become members of Conservancy. Conservancy's Board of Directors formally charters and authorizes this Committee to offer membership to projects that apply for membership in Conservancy.

Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.

He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.

Tom Callaway

Tom Callaway has been working for Red Hat since 2001. He started in Sales Engineering and has been the Fedora Engineering Manager since 2008. He served three consecutive elected terms on the Fedora Board from 2007 to 2011. Tom also maintains or co-maintains a large number of Packages in Fedora (currently 390) and is leading the Fedora Packaging Committee, responsible for RPM Packaging Standards and Practices. Additionally, he is responsible for managing Fedora's Legal issues. Tom frequently represents Fedora and Free Software at conferences around the world, and tries his best not to make too big of a fool of himself.

When not working, Tom enjoys geocaching, ice hockey, gaming, science fiction, and pinball.

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies which provides strategic consulting for collaborative open technology ventures. He is also the founder and executive director of QuestionCopyright.org. After working on CVS and writing Open Source Development With CVS (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O'Reilly, 2005), which is a highly-cited resource in the open source community. After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org. In addition to QuestionCopyright.org, he also serves as Open Civics Development Specialist at Civic Commons and sat on the board of the Open Source Initiative. Fogel now serves as the chairperson of the Evaluations Committee.

Mark Galassi

Mark Galassi has been involved in the GNU project since 1984. He currently works as a researcher in the International, Space, and Response division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he has worked on the HETE-2 satellite, ISIS/Genie, the Raptor telescope, the Swift satellite, and the muon tomography project. In 1997 Mark took a couple of years off from Los Alamos (where he was previously in the ISR division and the Theoretical Astrophysics group) to work for Cygnus (now a part of Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos, although he continued working on the HETE-2 satellite (an astrophysical Gamma Ray Burst mission) part time. Mark earned his BA in Physics at Reed College and a PhD from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook.

Mike Hostetler

Mike Hostetler is an inventor, entrepreneur, programmer and proud father. Having worked with web technologies since the mid 1990's, Mike has had extensive experience developing web applications with PHP and JavaScript. Currently, Mike works as the Founder and CEO of appendTo, LLC, the company dedicated to jQuery, based in Denver, Colorado. Heavily involved in Open Source, Mike is an alumni of the jQuery Core team, participates in the QCubed PHP5 Framework project, and participates in the Drupal project. When not in front of a computer, Mike enjoys hiking, fly-fishing, snowboarding and spending time with his family.

Bradley M. Kuhn

Bradley M. Kuhn began his work in the Free Software Movement as a volunteer when, in 1992, he became an early adopter of the popular GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software development consultant for Westinghouse, Lucent Technologies, and numerous small companies. He also spent one year teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science (using GNU/Linux and GCC) at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. In January 2000, he was hired by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and he served as its Executive Director from March 2001 until March 2005, when he left FSF to join the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), where he worked as SFLC's Policy Analyst and Technology Director from 2005 until October 2010, when he joined Conservancy as its Executive Director. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola College in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. His Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software languages.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer serves on the boards of AcaWiki and OpenHatch, and is chair of the Open Definition Advisory Council. From 2003 to 2012 he served as CTO and VP of Creative Commons, where he is now a Senior Fellow. In 2000 he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data mass collaboration platform.

Tom Marble

Tom Marble is best known for being the first “OpenJDK Ambassador” on the Sun Microsystems core team that open sourced the Java programming language. He continues to apply his community experiences in open source projects and his interest in intellectual property by co-organizing the legal and policy issues track at Europe's largest open source conference, FOSDEM. Marble is committed to increasing diversity in technology by volunteering as an organizer for ClojureBridge, a weekend workshop for women to learn the Clojure programming language, as well as Debian's participation in Outreachy. He is the founder of Informatique, Inc., a consultancy which leverages his hardware, software and legal engineering background for client projects as diverse as telematics for electric vehicles, probabilistic model checking, autonomous cyber defense, and multiplayer online gaming.

Martin Michlmayr

Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 15 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years, served on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for six years and currently serves on the board of Software Freedom Conservancy. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert. In this role, he facilitates open source activities both internally within HP as well as externally within the broader open source community. Martin earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge and he received an O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2013 for his contributions to the open source community.

Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson wants to make the world a better place with technology and social justice for all. After many years of local political organizing, she started handling outreach for the Free Software Foundation and became an enthusiastic free software activist. She likes talking to developers about software patents, to project maintainers about leadership and to activists about free software. She is currently the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at GNU MediaGoblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a.k.a. Free Software's Welcoming Committee. Nicholson also organizes Boston Software Freedom Day.

Karen Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of Conservancy. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. In partnership with the GNOME Foundation, Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women. Prior to taking up this position, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.

Tony Sebro

Tony Sebro is a seasoned technology attorney with a broad base of business and legal experience relating to technology, strategy, and business development. Before joining Conservancy, Tony was most recently a Partner with the PCT Companies, a family of professional service firms. Prior to that, he was Program Director, Technology & Intellectual Property at IBM's Armonk, New York world headquarters, where he was responsible for developing and executing licensing strategies in partnership with IBM's Software Group. In that role, Tony led negotiations and structured deals with market leaders in the web technology, e-commerce, retail, enterprise software, and financial services sectors. Tony also led various internal strategic initiatives, including an effort to provide business leaders of key emerging market opportunities with coordinated intellectual property development and monetization strategies, as well as the revamping and supervision of IBM's corporate-wide process for determining the value and availability of patents for sale. Prior to his tenure at IBM, Mr. Sebro practiced law in the New York office of Kenyon & Kenyon, LLP, handling litigation and licensing matters for clients in the medical, pharmaceutical and mechanical technology areas. Tony received his J.D. and his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tony is a member of the New York bar and registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Tony is also an active participant in and supporter of the non-profit community, and has served on the boards of multiple non-profit organizations.

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