Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

Career

Cooper has managed teams at Symantec and

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

For six years, she served as chief open source "evangelist" for Sun Microsystems before leaving to serve as senior director for open source strategies at

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

. In 2009 she worked as "Open Source Diva" at REvolution Computing (now

Revolution Analytics Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) is a statistical software company focused on developing open source and "open-core" versions of the free and open source software R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers. Revolution ...

). She is a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association. She is a board observer at

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

, and serves as a member of the Apache Software Foundation. She was a board member at the Drupal Association and the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...

. In October 2018, Danese joined Irish tech company NearForm as VP of Special Initiatives.

Open source

Cooper's major work within the open source area of

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

has garnered her the

nickname A nickname is a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person, place or thing. Commonly used to express affection, a form of endearment, and sometimes amusement, it can also be used to express defamation of character. As a concept, it is ...

"Open Source Diva". She was recruited, while at a sushi bar in Cupertino, to a position at Sun working towards opening the source code to

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

. Within six months she quit frustrated by the claims of open source development with Java that Sun made, only to find that little "open sourcing" was taking place. Sun sought to keep Cooper understanding her need to further open source software and re-hired her as their corporate open source officer. Her six years with Sun Microsystems is credited as the key to the company opening up its source code and lending support to Sun's

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

software suite,

Oracle Grid Engine Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director), was a grid computing computer cluster software system (otherwise known as a batch-queuing ...

, among others. In 2009 she joined REvolution Computing, a "provider of open source predictive analytics solutions", to work on community outreach amongst developers unfamiliar with the programming language R and general open source strategies. She has also made public speaking appearances discussing open sourcing, speaking at the Malaysian National Computer Confederation Open Source Compatibility Centre, OSCON, gov2.0 Expo, and the Southern California Linux Expo. In 2005 Cooper was a contributing author to ''Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution''.

Wikimedia Foundation

In February 2010 Cooper was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

, leading their technical team and developing and executing the Foundation's technical strategy, along with which she would also be working on outreach with Wikimedia volunteers to expand on development and localizing of software. Cooper credits the open source community in helping her obtain the position at Wikimedia. She left the organization in July 2011.

InnerSource

Danese Cooper is the founder and chair of the InnerSource Commons Foundation. In 2018 she co-authored ''Adopting InnerSource'' with Klaas-Jan Stol which was published by O'Reilly.

daneseWorks

In June 2011, Cooper started a consultancy, daneseWorks, whose first client was inBloom. She is also currently helping Numenta with their open source & machine learning strategy.

Personal life

Danese Cooper obtained her high school diploma from

Chadwick School Chadwick School is a nonsectarian independent K-12 day school located in an unincorporated area on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Specifically it is located at the top of the neighborhood referre ...

and her

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

. Upon graduation she spent time in

Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...

as a volunteer in the

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F ...

. Cooper credits her time with the Peace Corps as fostering her desire to travel and work within the developing world to explore policy, education and how open source software can "give certain kids another alternative". She is married to a software developer and enjoys knitting, which she often engages in during meetings.

References

External links

*
"Happy campers to test frontiers of new iPhone; Tech enthusiasts share ideas for latest gadget"
'' Edmonton Journal''. Edmonton, Alberta. 6 Jul 2007. Cooper speaks about the iPhone and its capabilities. *Cooper, D., C. DiBona and M. Stone. ''Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution''. Cambridge: O'Reilly. 2010. Cooper serves as a contributor to this book documenting open source technology. *Wickenheiser, Matt
"Sun Microsystems Guru Gives Talk on Open-Source Software at Maine Conference"
''

Portland Press Herald The ''Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram'' is a morning daily newspaper with a website that serves southern Maine and is focused on the greater metropolitan area around Portland, Maine, in the United States. Founded in 1862, its roots e ...

''. Portland, Maine. 16 Nov 2002. Cooper is interviewed about open source software and corporate concerns.
New DivaBlog
Danese Cooper's blog
"Danese Cooper (of Sun) Finally Answers"
an interview with Slashdot
"Why Whinging Doesn't Work"
Cooper speaks at OSCON 2008

an interview with Cooper by James Turner for O'Reilly Radar
"Q&A: Danese Cooper, Wikimedia"
with Justin Lee at The Whir

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cooper, Danese Living people American chief technology officers American computer programmers Followers of Meher Baba Free software programmers Open source people Peace Corps volunteers University of California, Los Angeles alumni Wikimedia Foundation staff members American women computer scientists American computer scientists Sun Microsystems people Members of the Open Source Initiative board of directors American expatriates in Morocco Women chief technology officers Year of birth missing (living people) American Wikimedians