Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation Announces Board

An immediate new addition to the permanent board members of the CodePlex Foundation founded by Microsoft is Jim Jagielski, chief architect at SpringSource, now a division of VMware. Jagielski is also on the board of the Apache Software Foundation, which a year ago celebrated its tenth anniversary, and an advisory board member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI).

The three other board membes are Sam Ramji, Tony Hey and Stephanie Davies Boesch. Sam Ramji had been senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft before taking on his new role in September 2009 as vice president of Sonoa Systems, a California company specializing in API analytics for cloud computing. Tony Hey is corporate VP of external research at Microsoft. He is by his own accounts primarily a researcher and a founder of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK) that supports academic open source projects for the UK e-Research community.

Stephanie Davies Boesch as the second Microsoft insider is the director of program management of the .NET framework, which is the only project having found any acceptance so far in the CodePlex Foundation, as a glance at a recent foundation webpage reveals. The four new permanent board members replace other members who presided at the founding in September, 2009.

The CodePlex board actually consists of five members. The fifth seat remains open while being discussed with interested corporate sponsors. It could be a tie-breaker, though, for what is now an even balance of Microsoft and non-Microsoft votes.