Stephen Walli

Bio

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 an advisor at Bitrock, Continuent, eBox, Ohloh, and TargetSource (each of which represents unique opportunities in the FOSS world). 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.