Nithya A. Ruff is the Executive Director, OSPO at Comcast. She is responsible for growing Open Source culture inside of Comcast and engagement with external communities. Prior to this, she started and grew Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office. She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 90s and has been building bridges between companies and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind, Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire and Eastman Kodak. Nithya has been director-at-large on the Linux Foundation Board for the last 3 years and was recently elected to be Chair of the Linux Foundation Board.
Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source. She has spoken at multiple conferences on the business and community of open source. In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. She was recently one of 4 people to win the 2017 O’Reilly Open Source Award for exceptional contribution to open source.
Nithya graduated with an MS in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School. You can follow her on twitter @nithyaruff
