Benito Gonzalez

Pronouns: 
he/him
Description of the candidate: 

Benito Gonzalez has been a software developer since 1994. His employment history ranges from government to game studio to higher education. In 2005, Benito joined University of California, Merced, where the new university focused on open source to keep licensing costs down. He started working on Sakai CLE and then uPortal and CAS as a developer, eventually moving on to Manager of Enterprise Web Application Development. In those 10 years, he developed passion and insight for the open source projects within his team. Missing the fun of coding (and with a switch in leadership that decided to move away from open source), Benito joined Unicon, Inc., where he could contribute even more to open source projects. At Unicon, he is able to spend time on open source projects and contribute to open source efforts as part of his job. 

- provide a open source contributor / mentor perspective to the board
- promote the mission of OSI and support the executive director in executing on goals
- be an ambassador for OSI at various open source events
- contribute to fundraising and awareness campaigns

- has promoted open source projects since 2005
- actively participated in Apereo (and formerly JASIG and Sakai) since 2006
- presents regularly at Apereo conferences on open source projects and incubation
- has been a member of open source Incubation Working Group (IWG) at Apereo/JASIG since 2011
- has been the chair of the Apereo IWG since 2017
 
Type of seat: 
Affiliate

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.