Michael Tiemann played a major role in establishing open source as a legitimate market force in its early days. His foray into open source started by making contributions to the GNU C Compiler and led to him being a co-founder of Cygnus Solutions: the world’s first open source software company. This company was ultimately sold to Red Hat and Tiemann has alternated his time since between serving as CTO of Red Hat and on the board of directors at the Open Source Initiative. Tiemann has a deep philosophical belief in open source that he manifests through successful business practices.
