James Bottomley
James Bottomley is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research where he works on Cloud and Container technology. He is also Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem. He has been a Director on the Board of the Linux Foundation and Chair of its Technical Advisory Board. He went to university at Cambridge for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees after which he joined AT&T Bell labs to work on Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 2000 he helped found SteelEye Technology, a High availability company for Linux and Windows, becoming Vice President and CTO. He joined Novell in 2008 as a Distinguished Engineer at Novell's SUSE Labs, Parallels (later Odin) in 2011 as CTO of Server Virtualization and IBM Research in 2016.
James Bottomley has been interested in Open Source and Linux for years, ever since he got his first paid gig in 1994 after finishing hi PhD by providing radically cheaper (than the current state of the art proprietary UNIX) workstations using Pentium systems running Linux. In 2002, thanks to trying to ship a product on Linux that used shared-SCSI, he got summoned to the Kernel Summit in Ottawa to explain how Linux SCSI could be fixed and ended up as SCSI Maintainer. In 2006 when OSDL was busy pushing Carrier Grade Linux and generally acting like the Linux Kernel Spokesperson, which annoyed a lot of Kernel Developers, he got into Open Source Politics by coming up with a strategy to control OSDL and make it more community driven, which he sold to the then Board of Directors resulting in the eventual formation of the Linux Technical Advisory board and the creation of the Linux Foundation TAB director on its Board to oversee community interactions. Over the years as TAB Chair, he acquired lots of insight into community dynamics and Open Source legal issues, which still fascinate him today. He is still active in Open Source, mainly in projects like the Trusted Platform Module, containers, hidden memory and the remapping bind mount which he's still trying to sell to the Linux Filesystems community.