The Linux Foundation | 27 June 2018
Google Becomes Platinum Member of Linux Foundation, Demonstrating its Commitment to the Open Source Community
Open source community leader Sarah Novotny to join The Linux Foundation Board of Directors
SAN FRANCISCO – June 27, 2018– The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces Google has become a Platinum member of the foundation. Google’s mission from its founding has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google was previously a Silver member of The Linux Foundation. Sarah Novotny, the head of open source strategy for Google Cloud Platform, will join The Linux Foundation Board of Directors as Google’s representative.
“Google is one of the biggest contributors to and supporters of open source in the world, and we are thrilled that they have decided to increase their involvement in The Linux Foundation,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “We are honored that Sarah Novotny, one of the leading figures in the open source community, will join our board – she will be a tremendous asset.”
“Open source is an essential part of Google’s culture, and we’ve long recognized the potential of open ecosystems to grow quickly, be more resilient and adaptable in the face of change, and create better software” said Sarah Novotny, head of open source strategy, Google Cloud. “The Linux Foundation is a fixture in the open source community. By working closely with the organization, we can better engage with the community-at-large and continue to build a more inclusive ecosystem where everyone can benefit.”
Additional Key Background Information
Google has been an active and committed contributor to the open source community for many years, releasing and contributing to more than 10,000 open source projects to date. Some of The Linux Foundation open source communities Google supports include Cloud Foundry, Node.js and the Open API Initiative.
Google was also a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), having created and open sourced CNCF’s popular Kubernetes container orchestration platform. Hundreds of Google employees remain heavily involved in the project today. Additionally, the company is a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative, which takes a proactive approach to securing some of the more important software technologies in the world, and the TODO Group, which collaborates on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs. Moreover, Google has been a leader in Software Defined Networking and other open source networking projects.
Becoming a Platinum member – the highest level of membership – of The Linux Foundation gives Google access to the foundation’s extensive knowledge and experience in open source governance, legal and technical topics. As a Platinum member, Google will also receive a seat on The Linux Foundation Board of Directors.
Sarah Novotny, who will represent Google on The Linux Foundation Board of Directors, also participates on the Node.js Foundation board. Novotny leads the open source strategy team for Google Cloud. She has long been an open source community champion in communities such as NGINX and MySQL.
More than 800 organizations are members of The Linux Foundation and the open source projects it hosts. AT&T, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, Tencent, Samsung and VMware are also Platinum members. To learn more about Linux Foundation membership or to join the organization, visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
# # #