Biography

Chris DiBona is a world authority on developer ecosystems and open source software, notably having run Google's open source office for nearly 19 years. Since 2016, he has been an advisor to the Royal United Services Institute, the worlds oldest defense and security think tank.  He is a limited partner with Rally Ventures and Mercury vencture capital funds.  More details about his investment activities can be found on his disclosures page.  He was named an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society in 2024. 

At Google, he started and ran the open source program office, ran engineering in google.org, helped across Alphabet's entities as varied as Waymo, Intrinsic, Verily and more. There he spun up and ran Google's first developer relations efforts, its maker effort, it's general science outreach, worked with GV, GCapital, and so, so much more. He help to hire close to 3000 people, including much of the Android and platforms teams and maintained Google's relationships with the hundred of thousands of developers the world over. 

Under President Barack Obama, he was a member of the US Commerce Departments' Data Access Commission. there he also spun up the All for good jobs site with Jonathan Greenblatt. 

Mr. DiBona has published two books on open source, countless articles and posts about the subject, has spoken thousands of times to venues big and small. Additionally, he helped with the production the Fractured Veil video game, HBO's Silicon Valley, Amazon's Good Omens adaptation and long ago, worked for VA LInux. Long ago, he was an editor for Slashdot.org, a sometimes broadcaster for TechTV, a podcaster for Floss Weekly  since 1998, Geeks in Space. 

A proud husband and father, Mr. DiBona lives in pacific northwest and has a Masters in software engineering from Carnegie Melon University.  He was a visiting scholar/scientist at MIT Sloan and took *forever* to get his bachelors from George Mason University.  He can be reached via chris@dibona.com.  Also available are profiles on wikipedia, imdb and a twitter feed which you can take a look at. Also, of course, he writes a substack

Disclosures/Bias:

Please read about my links and friends on my disclosures page.