Wikimedia Gets New CTO

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the people behind Wikipedia have a new CTO. Danese Cooper, who is well known in open source circles from the time at Sun and at Intel will take the CTO job starting in February.

Cooper is also a  Board member at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and has a keen understanding of open source licenses. The first time I ever saw Cooper speak was at a Linuxworld San Francisco event in 200 where she was on a panel talking about open source licensing.

It was the strangest panel I have ever seen in my whole career as a tech journalist.

Then CEO of SugarCRM John Roberts who was also on the panel hurled a few questions at Cooper about how the OSI operates and gets to choose what is and isn’t open source. While Cooper responded articulated and succinctly, she never actually looked over at Roberts or the audience. The whole time she was sitting on the panel she was — knitting. (Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against knitting – it’s just not something i had seen before on a panel – or since).