RESF Names Theodore Ts'o to Board

Theodore Ts’o has joined the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation’s Board of Directors.

On June 10, 2023, the membership of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) voted to approve Theodore Ts’o as an At-Large Director of the RESF Board, effective immediately. The bylaws of the RESF incorporate At-Large Directors on the Board in order to ensure a breadth of perspectives from the greater open-source community.

Since graduating from MIT in 1990, Ts'o started working on Linux in 1991, as the the first Linux kernel developer in North America. He has been a major contributor to the tty subsystem, the /dev/random and serial drivers, and the ext4 file system, for which he serves as its maintainer. Ts'o has served in the Internet Engineering Task Force as IPSec working group chair, and in the Security Area Directorate. Ts'o was one of the founders of the Free Standards Group, which eventually merged with Open Source Development Labs to form the Linux Foundation, where he serves as vice-chair of the LF's Technical Advisory Board. Ts'o is a Debian developer whose work experience includes MIT, IBM, and Google.

Ts’o has a history of advocacy for open-source software. In 2006 he was presented the Award for the Advancement of Free Software by the Free Software Foundation. Starting in 2007 he held a two-year fellowship with the Linux Foundation, serving as a Chief Platform Specialist and later Chief Technology Officer. He has also been a member, including holding leadership positions, of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IPsec Working Group, and the Free Standards Group.

The RESF is an organizational body designed to help open-source projects thrive with a structure that ensures a balanced and fair distribution of community control while specifically enabling enterprise use-cases, vendors, and commercial entities. We look forward to Mr. Ts’o’s perspectives and influence to support the communities of Rocky Linux as well as other open source projects, both current and future, within the RESF.