Mandriva Appoints Worldwide VP of Engineering

Published: January 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Mandriva, which is trying to carve a place for itself in the commercial Linux market alongside Red Hat and Novell, announced last week that it has appointed David Barth as worldwide vice president of engineering. The move follows the appointments by Red Hat and Novell of their own chief technology officers at the end of last year.

Barth was previously chief technology officer at IdealX, a European system integrator and frequent contributor to key open source projects, including PKI encryption and other security features, Samba integration with OpenLDAP, and the OpenBSD Unix variant. The Samba work and Barth's interfacing with the Samba development community was the key credential that Mandriva cited as his qualification for the job to spearhead Mandriva's software engineering efforts. Barth did this work at IdealX for five years, and prior to that, he was a Linux consultant for Technologia Group, which provides Unix and Linux training in North America, while at the same time providing technical services to Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, a Swiss organization dedicated to the research and collaboration between the technical university and European businesses. Barth was also the head of engineering at the first two European ISPs back in the early 1990s, and was a contributor to the early releases of Linux at that time.