Simon Phipps

Simon Phipps is managing director at Meshed Insights Ltd, advising companies globally on the dynamics of open communities and digital rights. He was previously head of open source at Sun Microsystems and a founder of IBM’s Java business unit.

He is a pro bono director and President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit organisation that advocates for open source software, builds bridges between open source communities and maintains the canonical list of open source licenses. He is also on the board of the Open Rights Group and of The Document Foundation. He has been widely involved in standardisation activities, including as a founding director of the Open Mobile Alliance and as one of the Sun executives sponsoring the donation of resources to OASIS to create Open Document Format (ODF). He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society as well as an Open Forum Fellow.