Frank Hecker

Was Director, Grants and Programs, for the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization supporting the Mozilla open source project (creator of the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, and other products). I joined the Mozilla Foundation after the spinoff of the Mozilla Corporation as a wholly-owned taxable subsidiary. At various times as part of my duties I managed Foundation financial and legal affairs in conjunction with our contract CFO and pro bono legal counsel, including organizational budgets, tax filings and related public disclosure reports, contracts, trademark and copyright filings, and software licensing issues. I created and managed an active program of grantmaking in support of Mozilla-related projects, including initiatives to support enhanced web accessibility for people with disabilities. I managed the Mozilla Education initiative to promote teaching of Mozilla technologies and practices in college and university courses. I managed Foundation conference and trade show appearances. Last but not least, I served as a public spokesperson for the Foundation where appropriate.

I provided pre-sales support for Opsware data center automation products, including the Opsware Server Automation System for server configuration management and the Opsware Network Automation System for network device configuration management. I worked with Opsware marketing and engineering groups to define and scope product requirements for the government market. I initiated and helped manage the initiative to evaluate Opsware SAS against the Common Criteria security standard.

I provided technical support of CollabNet sales in the eastern United States. I also helped provide CollabNet consulting services related to business strategies involving open source and "gated community" collaborative development, open source licensing, and management and governance issues for open source and "gated community" collaborative development projects. I was sales technical lead and consultant to Dresdner Kleinwort, a major European investment bank investing in an open source strategy for development of the openadaptor Java-based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) toolkit, including creation of The Software Conservancy, an independent nonprofit organization to hold copyright to the source code and provide a legal framework for volunteer development. I also created the CollabNet training courses "Introduction to Open Source" and "Open Source Licensing and Beyond".

I headed the pre-sales technical support team for the Netscape government group (later absorbed into AOL as part of the iPlanet joint initiative with Sun), managing four other SEs. I was sales technical lead for the Netscape/DoD worldwide site license (an 8-figure contract later taken over by Red Hat), the initiative to support FORTEZZA cryptographic capabilities in Netscape products, the Netscape Security Services (later Network Security Services) project, and Netscape's FIPS 140 validation effort, among others. Overall I was the technical lead in sales activities resulting in over $80M in revenue to Netscape. In other activities, I was a key contributor to Netscape's decision to release source code for Netscape Communicator, and helped initiate the AOL Government Guide project to provide an online portal for consumer/citizen access to government services. In 1998 I was appointed one of three Netscape Fellows, the highest recognition possible for technical personnel at Netscape.