Stephen Walli

I have worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. I currently consult on software business development and open source strategy, often working with partners like Initmarketing and InteropSystems. I organized the agenda, speakers and sponsors for the inaugural Beijing Open Source Software Forum as part of the 2007 Software Innovation Summit in Beijing. I'm a board director at eBox, and an advisor at Bitrock, Continuent, Ohloh, and TargetSource (each of which represents unique opportunities in the FOSS world). I was the open-source-strategist-in-residence for Open Tuesday out of Finland. I was briefly CTO and Vice-president, Engineering at a new start-up I helped co-found in the Fall 2006, but have moved on to other things. (Sorry, no names as they're still under cover.)

I was Vice-president, Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, Inc. through it's initial 19 months. Prior to that I was a business development manager in the Windows Platform team at Microsoft working in the space between community development, standards, and intellectual property concerns. Before joining the platforms business team, I was a program manager on Rotor, the shared source implementation of the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure standard on Windows and FreeBSD. I started at Microsoft as a Product Unit Manager for Interix.

I was executive staff (vice-president, R&D) and a founder at Softway Systems, Inc., a venture backed startup that developed the Interix environment to re-host UNIX applications on Windows NT. The Interix product juggled core Softway developed code, Microsoft licensed code, and a wealth of OSS covered by a myriad of licenses. Softway was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.

Before starting Softway Systems, I worked as an independent consultant for X/Open, SunSoft, UNISYS (expert witness), and the Canadian government. Going back further, I've been a development manager at Mortice Kern Systems, and a systems analyst at Electronic Data Systems, a programmer analyst at Sears (real-time distribution controls), and a real-time programmer at Ferrco Engineering.

I was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991. Publications include:

• "Under the Hood: Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context ", in Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution, edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, Mark Stone, (O'Reilly Media, 2006, ISBN 0-59-600802-3)
• "POSIX: A Case Study in a Successful Standard, Or Why We Don’t Need Radical Change in the SDO Process", Proceedings of the IEEE Standards and Innovation in Information Technology Conference in Aachen, Germany, September 1999.
• "INTERIX: UNIX Application Portability to Windows NT via an Alternative Environment Subsystem", Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop in Seattle, WA, August 1997, and later as an Invited Talk at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, New Orleans, LA, June 1998.
• Migrating Applications to Open Platforms, an X/Open Guide (Prentice Hall, 1996, ISBN 0-13-266610-3).
• "The Myth of Applications Source-Code Conformance", in StandardView, ACM Perspectives on Standardization, Volume 4, Number 2, June 1996.
• Go Solo: How to Implement and Go Solo with the Single UNIX Specification, (Prentice Hall, 1995, ISBN 0-13-439381-3)

The (really) long version of the CV.