James Vasile
Coach *
James Vasile has fifteen years’ experience as a user, developer, advocate and advisor in the free and open source software world. His expertise is in software licensing and community-building, as well as non-profit and small business startup. He focuses on free software and open source production, although his work and interests often take him far beyond the world of software. Much of what James does involves teaching people how to build successful businesses around free software and ensuring licensing alignment in multisource FOSS stacks. James’s technical experience also allows him to act as outsource CTO/Architect, due-diligence open source expert, new venture advisor, convening facilitator, and more.
James currently serves on the governing or advisory boards of Horizons, Brave New Software, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In addition to his work with OTS, James was the founding Director of the Open Internet Tools Project, which during his tenure originated a variety of excellent community-based projects. These include Techno-Activism Third Mondays (a meetup that gathers people in over 20 cities around the world every month), the Circumvention Tech Festival (which has become the Internet Freedom Festival), and a 1000+ volunteer translation project now know as Localization Lab. He was also a founding board member of Overview Services, which made open source software that powers Pulitzer-winning data journalism.
Previously, James was a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he advised and supported a wide range of free software efforts.
James was a Director of the FreedomBox Foundation. He helped boot up and served on the board of Open Source Matters, the non-profit behind Joomla. He remains active in several technology development efforts. His FreedomBox work has been recognized by an Innovation Award at Contact Summit 2011 as well as an Ashoka ChangeMaker’s award for Citizen’s Media.
James frequently speaks and writes about technology trends and free software. You can learn more about him from his GitHub activity and his LinkedIn profile, or by connecting with him on Mastodon or X.