Joy joins former Oracle Corp president and COO Ray Lane on the board of Redwood City, California-based SpikeSource, which offers testing, certification, and support services for a pre-configured stack of open source software projects.
The company offers seven pre-configured stacks based on a number of open source components, including Linux, the Apache Web Server, the MySQL Database, JBoss Application Server, Python, and PHP.
Joy is the former Sun chief scientist who helped design Sun’s Sparc processor, Solaris operating system, and Java software architecture, but left the company in September 2003 before joining venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in January 2005. KPCB has been involved with SpikeSource since its inception, with KPCB general partner and SpikeSource chairman Lane founding the company in 2003 with chief technology officer Murugan Pal.
The venture capitalist firm then acted as an incubator for SpikeSource until it was unveiled to the outside world in September 2004, and subsequently joined Fidelity Ventures, Intel Capital, and Omidyar Network in investing $12.9m in the company in May 2005.
Fidelity partner Dave Power also joined SpikeSource’s board of directors at that time, with the board completed by CEO Kim Polese who joined the company in September 2004. Polese should be well known to Joy as she was the original product manager for Java, leading its launch in March 1995, and is credited with deciding on the name of the write once, run anywhere programming language.
SpikeSource has also boosted its executive team with the appointment of Joaquin Ruiz as vice president of product marketing, and Anders Tjernlund as vice president of support services. Ruiz was formerly at Liquid Systems Inc, an emerging messaging and collaboration software vendor that is operating in stealth mode, as well as Sistina Systems, which was acquired by Linux distributor Red Hat Inc in 2003. Tjernlund, meanwhile, was previously the senior director of worldwide support operations at BEA Systems Inc and will develop and manage SpikeSource’s global customer support team, an essential element of its services offering.
He is not the only former BEA employee to have joined an open source services firm, although the most high-profile have gone to SpikeSource rival SourceLabs Inc, which was set up by three former BEA executives in September 2004.
SourceLabs also has a management team to boast about with CEO Byron Sebastian, chief architect Will Pugh, and VP of sales and marketing Cornelius Willis, joined by Ignition Partners founder and former Microsoft senior vice president Brad Silverberg, as well as Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer.
The company also moved to boost its credential among the open source community with open source evangelist Bruce Perens joining as the company’s vice president of developer relations and policy.
