Black Duck Blog

Rob Bearden
Until its recent acquisition by VMWare, Rob Bearden was President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of SpringSource. Rob has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, with a track record for building strong, global sales organizations and operations.

Before joining SpringSource, Bearden served as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital, a leading venture capital firm based in the Silicon Valley. He was also chief operating officer for OpenSpan, a desktop integration software provider, responsible for global sales, marketing, business development and administration.

Most notably, Bearden previously served as chief operating officer for JBoss, an open source middleware company, where he helped architect and execute the company’s business model and managed its worldwide operations.

Prior to JBoss/Red Hat, Bearden was president of the Americas at i2 Technologies, a supply chain software provider, overseeing operations in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Mexico. He also served as senior vice president of worldwide sales for Manhattan Associates and spent six years at Oracle Corporation in various executive positions.

Karen Copenhaver
Karen Copenhaver is a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, and is also director of intellectual property strategy for the Linux Foundation.

Her full bio and contact information can be found here.

Mark Radcliffe
Mark Radcliffe is a senior partner who practices corporate securities and intellectual property at DLA Piper. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Mr. Radcliffe’s practice focuses on representing corporations in their intellectual property and finance matters.

He has worked with many open source companies and is Chair of the Open Source Industry Group at the firm. He assisted Sun Microsystems in open sourcing the Solaris operating system and drafting the CDDL. And he represents other large companies in their open source matters including eBay, Accenture, Adobe, Palm and Sony. He represents many open source startups including SugarCRM (the first venture backed open source applications company), DotNetNuke, Cleversafe and rSmart, as their general outside counsel (including both their financing and intellectual property matters), and represents or has represented Zimbra, DeviceVM, Hyperic, Compiere, Funambol and Reductive Labs for intellectual property matters. He represented Siemens Venture Capital in their investment in MontaVista Software, Inc and Hummer Winblad and Morganthaler in their investment in MuleSource. He also serves as outside General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative and was the Chair of Committee C for the Free Software Foundation in reviewing GPLv3.

He writes frequently on his blog about open source matters and has participated in a series of webinars on open source legal issues with Black Duck.

His full bio and contact information can be found here.