The Linux Foundation | 16 February 2021
Today, the Linux Foundation announced that Renesas’ Hisao Munakata has been re-elected to its board, representing the Gold Member community. GitLab’s Eric Johnson has been elected to represent the Silver Member community. Linux Foundation elected board directors serve 2-year terms.
Directors elected to the Linux Foundation’s board are committed to building sustainable ecosystems around open collaboration to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. The Linux Foundation expands the open collaboration communities it supports with community efforts focused on building open standards, open hardware, and open data. It is dedicated to improving diversity in open source communities and working on processes, tools, and best security practices in open development communities.
Hisao Munakata, Renesas (Gold Member)
Renesas is a global semiconductor manufacturer that provides cutting-edge SoC (system-on-chip) devices for the automotive, industry, and infrastructure. As open source support became essential for the company, Munakata-san encouraged Renesas developers to follow an “upstream-first” scheme to minimize gaps from the mainline community codebase. The industry has now accepted this as standard practice, following Renesas’ direction and pioneering work.
Munakata-san has served as an LF board director since 2019 and has reflected the voice from the embedded industry.
Renesas, which joined the Linux Foundation in 2011, has ranked in the top twelve kernel development contributor firms in the past 14 years. Munakata-san serves pivotal roles in various LF projects such as the AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) Advisory Board, Yocto Project Advisory Board, Core Embedded Linux Project, and OpenSSF. In these roles, Munakata-san has supported many industry participants in these projects to achieve harmony.
As cloud-native trends break barriers between enterprise and embedded systems, Munakata-san seeks to improve close collaboration across the industry and increase contribution from participants in the embedded systems space, focusing on safety in a post-COVID world.
Eric Johnson, GitLab (Silver Member)
Eric Johnson is the Chief Technology Officer at GitLab, Inc. — the first single application for the DevSecOps lifecycle. GitLab is a free, open core software used by more than 30 million registered users to collaborate, author, test, secure, and release software quickly and efficiently.
At GitLab, Eric is responsible for the organization that integrates the work of over a hundred external open source contributors into GitLab’s codebase every month. During his tenure Eric has contributed to a 10x+ increase in annual recurring revenue and has scaled Engineering from 100 to more than 550 people while dramatically increasing team diversity in gender, ethnicity, and country-of-residence. He’s also helped turn GitLab, Inc. into one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world, as evidenced by their substantial monthly on-premise releases.
Eric is also a veteran of 4 previous enterprise technology startups in fields as varied as marketing technology, localization software, streaming video, and commercial drone hardware/software. He currently advises two startups in the medical trial software and recycling robotics industries.
Eric brings his open source and Linux background to the Foundation. In his professional work, he has spent 17 years hands-on or managing teams that develop software that runs on Linux systems, administrating server clusters, orchestrating containers, open-sourcing privately built software, and contributing back to open source projects. Personally, he’s also administered a Linux home server for the past ten years.
As a Linux Foundation board member, Eric looks forward to using his execution-focused executive experience to turn ideas into results. Collaboration with the Linux Foundation has already begun with Distributed Developer ID and Digital Bill of Materials (DBoM). As a remote work expert with years of experience developing best practices, Eric will use his expertise to help the board, the Foundation, and its partners become more efficient in a remote, asynchronous, and geographically distributed way.