- Maffulli joins OSI after decades of open source advocacy, both as a contributor and leader
- He co-founded and led the Italian chapter of Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2007
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has named Stefano Maffulli as its first Executive Director. The appointment is a key step for the transformation of OSI into a professionally managed organization, a process that the Board of Directors started in 2020.
After an expansive search led by OSI’s purpose-built staffing committee, the Board of Directors appointed Maffulli, an experienced international leader in enterprise and open source environments.
Joshua Simmons, Board Chair of OSI said that bringing Stefano Maffulli on board as OSI’s first Executive Director is the culmination of a years-long march toward professionalization, so that OSI can be a stronger and more responsive advocate for open source.
Maffulli joins OSI after decades of open source advocacy, both as a contributor and leader. He co-founded and led the Italian chapter of Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2007. He has also structured the developer community of the OpenStack Foundation and led open source marketing teams in several international companies. He has contributed documentation patches, translations and advocated for projects as diverse as GNU, QGIS, OpenStreetmap and WordPress.
Maffull added that open source software is everywhere, but its definition is constantly being challenged. The zombies of shared source, limited-use and proprietary software are emerging from the graves where we put them to rest in the 90s, threatening the whole ecosystem, he further added.
