Committee
The following elected FDL committee members are responsible for evaluating project proposals and deciding on fund allocation. In order to be eligible to act on the committee, members are required to have an PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science related disciplines as well as being authors of FLOSS/Free Software. We are currently looking for new committee members.
Jean-Paul Smets
Jean-Paul Smets is the founder and CEO of Nexedi. After graduating in mathematics and computer science at ENS (Paris), he started his career as a civil servant at the French Ministry of Economy. He then left government to start a small company called "Nexedi" where he developed his first Free Software, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) designed to manage the production of swimsuits in the not-so-warm but friendly north of France. ERP5 was born. In parallel, he led with Hartmut Pilch (FFII) the successful campaign to protect software innovation against the dangers of software patents. The campaign eventually succeeeded by rallying more than 100.000 supporters and thousands of CEOs of European software companies (both open source and proprietary). The Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions was rejected on 6 July 2005 by the European Parliament by an overwhelming majority of 648 to 14 votes, showing how small companies can together in Europe defeat the powerful lobbying of large corporations. Since then, he has helped Nexedi to grow either organically or by investing in new ventures led by bright entrepreneurs.
Gaël Varoquaux
Gaël Varoquaux is an Inria faculty researcher working on data science and brain imaging. He has a joint position at Inria (French Computer Science National research) and in the Neurospin brain research institute. His research focuses on using data and machine learning for scientific inference, applying it to brain-imaging data to understand cognition, as well as developing tools that make it easier for non-specialists to use machine learning. Years before the NSA, he was hoping to make bleeding-edge data processing available across new fields, and he has been working on a mastermind plan building easy-to-use open-source software in Python. He is a core developer of scikit-learn, joblib, Mayavi and nilearn, a nominated member of the PSF, and often teaches scientific computing with Python using the scipy lecture notes.
Stéfane Fermigier
Stéfane Fermigier is the founder and CEO of Abilian, a company which develops and markets an Open Source Enterprise 2.0 platform, and a range of solutions based on it, from social CRM to lightweight collaboration, from event management to MOOCs. He is also the founder of Nuxeo, the pioneer and leader of Open Source ECM, maker of the Nuxeo Enterprise Content Management Platform and open source solutions for Document Management, Digital Asset Management and Case Management. He is cofounder (and chairman) of AFUL, the french-speaking free software users association and cofounder (and currently chairman) of the Free / Open Source Software Interest Group in the Systematic competitiveness cluster.