People

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, just got a promotion to corporate vice president, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Gutierrez, who has taken an increasingly active role in Microsoft's intellectual-property strategy since moving back from Paris a few years ago, where he had served as Microsoft's associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa (and where I first met him for hot chocolate and coffee), is well-known to the open-source crowd for his involvement in Microsoft's accusations in 2007 that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents.

This, however, doesn'… Read more

Steve Albrecht, a longstanding Red Hat board member, has resigned from Red Hat's board effective June 30, 2009. The reason? Albrecht, originally tapped six years ago by Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik, will serve as a mission president in Japan for the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), starting in early July.

It's a new mission for Albrecht, but will require many of the same attributes that made him a successful board member for Red Hat. My father also serves as a mission president in the LDS Church (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and I've seen … Read more

I don't have any scientific proof of this, but it strikes me that open-source CEOs are different. Not just because some sport ponytails (Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz), or some speak with a light Southern drawl (Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst), or even that some swear in Italian (Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco).

No, what really makes them different, at least as compared to their enterprise software counterparts, is their cutting-edge adoption of technology.

In this they're no different (and probably a bit behind) the Web 2.0 crowd, but compared to an HP, IBM, or SAP CEO, the CEOs … Read more

Marten Mickos, former MySQL chief executive and current senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' database group, is transitioning out of the company in a planned reorganization.

I reached Mickos this morning for confirmation: he is definitely leaving. This move is not prompted by weakness in MySQL's business, which just closed an exceptional quarter, as he told me by phone.

"There is nothing in the MySQL business that is prompting me to leave," Mickos said. "Business is great. We just closed a multimillion-dollar deal recently that confirms much of the momentum we've made. We just closed … Read more

It's official: Michael "Monty" Widenius has officially quit his job at Sun Microsystems, as noted on his blog, and will be starting his own company.

I reported in September that Widenius, primary author of the original MySQL database and one of MySQL's founders, had left, which proved to be almost true. He was leaving, but he didn't quite make it out the door.

As of Wednesday, he's gone.

The reason isn't any different from what prompted him to move toward the exit door in September, as he notes on his blog: Widenius feels … Read more

Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, is running for president.

No, not that presidency. The presidency of the Drupal Association, the organization that oversees the development of Drupal.

It's somewhat astonishing that Buytaert should have to campaign for a position that he so clearly has already earned, but it's also a testament to the meritocracy that is open source, as well as to Buytaert's own humility, that he feels compelled to do so, anyway.

And so Buytaert writes up a list of reasons why the Drupal community should vote for him, including this one:

Despite our extensive activities … Read more

One of the best ways to see how a company is doing is by looking at the caliber of people it attracts. With that in mind, it's impressive to see whom open-source enterprise resource-planning vendor Openbravo just recruited:

Jesper Balser, co-founder and former CEO of Navision, a leading ERP vendor acquired by Microsoft in 2002, is the newest member of its board of directors.

In addition, Openbravo has hired Cees Poortman, another veteran of Navision and Microsoft, as its vice president of global commercial operations.

The VAR Guy suggests that these hires "speak volumes about growing momentum for … Read more

Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and CEO of open-source Zimbra, which sold for $350 million to Yahoo, is leaving Yahoo, as VentureBeat reports.

Though Zimbra president and CTO, Scott Dietzen, has been running day-to-day operations in Dharmaraj's place for some time, it's not a great time for Dharmaraj to leave Yahoo, as Boomtown suggests. Zimbra was always the sum of many important parts, but Dharmaraj helped to steer the company with very few visible flaws in execution. Yahoo needs that sort of leadership to rebuild its brand and expand its enterprise offerings from its Zimbra beachhead.

So, too bad for … Read more

Ever since June, when Ed Boyajian left his post as Red Hat vice president of North America sales to become CEO of EnterpriseDB, Red Hat has been operating without an equivalent sales executive in North America.

Regional executives Ian Knight, Sean Doherty, and others have delivered the numbers under the guidance of Alex Pinchev, Red Hat's executive vice president of global sales. But the company needed to replace Boyajian.

Red Hat on Monday announced the appointment of Greg Symon as vice president and general manager of North American sales. Symon comes to Red Hat from Intel, where he has … Read more