Michael Tiemann is a true open source software pioneer. He made his first major open source contribution more than three decades ago by writing the GNU C++ compiler, the first native-code C++ compiler and debugger. His early work led to the creation of leading open source technologies and the first open source business model.
In 1989, Tiemann's technical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found Cygnus Solutions, the first company to provide commercial support for open source software. During his ten years at Cygnus, Tiemann contributed in a number of roles from President to hacker, helping lead the company from fledgling start-up to an admired open source leader. When Cygnus was acquired by Red Hat in 2000, Tiemann became Red Hat's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) before becoming its first Vice President of Open Source Affairs. In that role Tiemann provides technology, strategy, and policy advice to executives in the public and private sectors.
Tiemann graduated from the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania (Class of 1986) with a BS CSE degree, and later did research at INRIA (1988) and Stanford University (1988-1989).
Tiemann has served on a number of boards that have been instrumental in establishing Open Source as a leading development and commercial practice in the software industry. He joined the board of the Open Source Initiative in 2001 and served as its President from 2005-2012. Tiemann was also a founding board member of the Embedded Linux Consortium, the Eclipse Foundation, and an advisor to the GNOME Foundation. Tiemann provides financial support to organizations that further the goals of software and programmer freedom, including the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He was also a Trustee of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a founding member of the Board of Advisors for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (2006-present). Tiemann has also remained active in the Creative Commons community, as both a sponsor of projects and promoter of the cause.
Authored Comments
<em>Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire<em>
I, too, attended the Emerging Issues Forum, and it was a great event. As I listened to these talks, a new frame came into focus, which is that when a business talks about "increased efficiency" they usually mean "we found a new way to externalize costs". That's a war on reality because in the real world shifting a cost does not eliminate it, it just means somebody else is going to bear it. And it is fundamentally irresponsible to make it ones business to sneak cost onto the balance sheet of customers, partners, and especially non-customers.
There are rare times, as with many open source projects, where effort is not treated like cost, but like investment or education (which is an investment of the mind). When efforts actually build stores rather than depleting them, fundamental economics improve and we are able to move beyond the zero-sum game. Alas, by attending to a selective subset of reality, paying mostly attention to the measurable analytic without proper regard for the vital creative, companies convince themselves of absurdities all the time. What happens then?