The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) has announced the initial board of directors that are leading the effort to preserve the longevity, stewardship and innovation of enterprise-grade open source software that is always freely available.

The RESF board election took place from December 7-21, 2022 with all current RESF members voting. The initial priorities for the board are to ensure that the organization’s project structure is completed and that directors are named, to ensure community alignment and representation, and to help the RESF and its projects with growth, structure, alignment, sponsors, partnerships and other support.

Board members include:

Louis Abel is a system engineer who started his Linux journey in 2005. He has been in the Enterprise Linux world both personally and professionally for almost a decade and a half, jumping between automation, system hardening and security and identity management. Abel is a Rocky Linux co-founder, has been a part of almost all engineering initiatives across the project, and has been a co-lead of the release engineering team since the inception of the project.

Benjamin (Ben) Agner is one of the co-founders of Rocky Linux and was a co-author of the RESF charter and bylaws. He has over two decades of IT, security, engineering, governance, risk and compliance experience, ranging from hyper-growth startups to large enterprises, and has spent the majority of the last decade securely implementing and managing open source software in the enterprise.

Chris DiBona is an independent engineering leader located in the United States. He has been an advisor to the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest defense and security think tank, since 2016. He was the director of engineering for open source at Google from 2004 through 2023 where he launched a variety of platforms and projects, including Android, Go, Chromium and Kubernetes.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a well-known Linux kernel maintainer at the Linux Foundation and is in charge of the stable kernel releases. He maintains various driver-related subsystems in the kernel, has been involved in the kernel developer community since 1999, and has been a member of the Linux kernel security team since it was founded.

Gregory M. Kurtzer is a 20-plus-year veteran in Linux, open source and high performance computing. He is well known in the HPC space for designing scalable, secure and easy-to-manage architectures for innovative performance-intensive computing while working for the U.S. Department of Energy with a joint appointment to UC Berkeley.

Mark Watson has more than 40 years of hands-on experience supporting research economists, researchers and engineers. Watson retired in January 2022 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, where he served as vice president and director of the Center for the Advancement of Data and Research in Economics (CADRE).

The first meeting of the RESF board occurred on January 16 to select the projects, establish the Project Board structure and review financials.