Name: Stephen Walli

Company: Optaris

Job Title: VP, Open Source Development Strategy

Bio: Stephen Walli is the Vice-president of Open Source Development Strategy for Optaros. Stephen is responsible for architecting and managing Optaros´ relationships with the open source community. Prior to joining Optaros, Stephen was an advocate for open source at Microsoft, where he was focused on “shared source” business strategies and was responsible for technical implementation of open source-related community projects (i.e., creating a business model at Microsoft to engage in the open source community). Stephen was a business development manager in the Windows Platform team, working in the space between community development, standards, and intellectual property concerns.

Prior to Microsoft Stephen was the Vice-president of R&D and a founder at Softway Systems, Inc., a venture-backed startup that developed the Interix environment to re-host UNIX applications on Windows NT. Stephen has also worked as an independent consultant for X/Open, SunSoft, UNISYS, and the Canadian government. He was once a development manager at Mortice Kern Systems, and a systems analyst at Electronic Data Systems.

Stephen 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 has been a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991.

Stephen was one of the essay writers for the most recent edition of O´Reilly´s Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution.