Nithya Ruff

Nithya Ruff is the Senior Director for Comcast’s Open Source Strategy Practice. Most recently, she founded and managed Western Digital’s Open Source Office.

She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 1990s and has been building bridges between hardware developers and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind River (an Intel Company), Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire, and Eastman Kodak. At Wind River, she led a team of product managers in managing a world-class embedded Linux distribution and was a key member of the Yocto Project advocacy team on the board.

Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in open source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source, such as in marketing, legal, and community. She is co-leader of the Women of OpenStack (WOO) group and a liaison into the OpenStack Foundation. Her work has also included partnering with the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) on a Male Allies Workshop and panel, as well as being a mentor at OpenStack. She is also a sponsor of the Women in Open Source (WIOS) Lunch at The Linux Foundation and an active leader of WIOS advocating for reducing barriers for women and under-represented minorities.