Roberto Galoppini

Roberto is a computer industry insider of 15+ years standing. Up until 1994 Roberto had never heard of Linux, until he chanced to lead a group of geeks in starting up a mobile ISP with just a bunch of old PCs. Since then Roberto has worked in such hands-on roles as programmer and systems analyst, eventually founding an open source firm in 2001, and an open source consortium in 2004.

Roberto has taken an active interest in several free/open source software organizations. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the SourceForge Marketplace and acts as the Institutional Relationship Manager for the OpenOffice.org Italian Association. Since 2004 Roberto has researched the economics of OSS, collaborating with universities and EC funded research projects. Roberto is also a technical writer for IT and computer-related magazines.

Roberto blogs on commercial Open Source software at http://robertogaloppini.net.

Sandro Groganz

Sandro Groganz has practiced and fathomed the art of being open since he was born and found a home in the Open Source movement. Prior to founding InitMarketing, he was the VP Marketing at Mindquarry, an Open Source startup financed by Hasso Plattner Ventures, and the VP Communication at eZ Systems, creator of the Open Source content management system eZ Publish. Sandro also has a background as a PHP developer, consultant and author contributing to various books covering LAMP programming. Sandro shares his insights in Open Source marketing at his Weblog The Art of Being Open.

Andreas Heer

Andreas Heer has a longtime experience as a journalist and editor in the field of information technology. He worked for different publications and wrote about nearly every aspect of IT. His career started at Macworld Switzerland, after that, he worked about five years for the Swiss daily newspaper "Tages-Anzeiger". After some years as a freelancer, he wrote for Computerworld Switzerland. Read more about Andreas.

Shezmeen Prasad

Shezmeen has been in the Sales and Marketing field for almost a decade, specializing in Open Source software for the past five years. Originally a Canadian, Shezmeen has spent the past 15 months in a small coastal town in Norway, working at the headquarters office of eZ Systems, an Open Source CMS company, in the positions of Events Manager, and Global Marketing & PR. Previously, she worked at ActiveState Software Inc., an Open Source tools and languages company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With her passion for Open Source marketing, Shezmeen brings the InitMarketing team her expertise in event management, marketing campaign development and public relations strategies with a global focus. Now that she has traveled and worked internationally, Shezmeen has found her home in San Francisco, California.

Rory MacDonald

An archetypically radical youngest child of three, Rory MacDonald is a leftfield thinker. He delights in challenging conservative thinking and the status quo in order to bring out its true strengths, cut away the fat and drive innovation. With a passion for business, technology and creative disruption, Rory has worked for over a decade within a variety of roles in marketing, communications and journalism. He has worked with the broadest imaginable spectrum of companies which stretch the term “technology” to its outermost relevance. Read more about Rory.

Vikram Vaswani

Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a consulting services firm with special expertise in open-source tools. He is a Felix Scholar for the University of Oxford, a passionate proponent of the open-source movement and a frequent contributor articles and tutorials on open-source technologies to the community at large.

His previous books include PHP Programming Solutions, MySQL: The Complete Reference and How to do Everything with PHP and MySQL.

Stephen R. Walli

Stephen has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. He currently consults on software development business and Open Source strategy, and is the Open-Source-strategist-in-residence for Open Tuesday out of Finland.

Stephen was VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on Open Source, and VP Research & Development and founder at Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT before being acquired by Microsoft. He was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991.

Stephen has an essay in O'Reilly's "Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution". He blogs about Open Source, standards, and software businesses at http://stephesblog.blogs.com.