There are many faces behind what goes on at the Linux Foundation: the officers and employees who run the day to day show, the Board of Directors who keep the ship on course, and of course, the volunteers who support, promote, and participate in the Foundation's activities. Among that number are those that act as the voice of the people themselves.

The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board is described as one that "collaborates with the Linux Foundation on programs and issues that affect the Linux community" and "fosters bi-directional interaction with application developers, end users, and Linux companies." The ten individuals are elected by the kernel community itself — half one year, half the next — and sit on the TAB for two years, with the possibility of re-election. Its chair — who will be elected at the Collaboration Summit next March — holds a seat on the Foundation's Board of Directors.

That possibility was recently fulfilled for two members, with the announcement of the results of the annual election, which took place at the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo. Of the five additions to the Board announced by the Foundation, two already have favorite spots at the table: Jon Corbet, Linux Kernel Weather Report author, and Greg Kroah-Hartman of Novell, SUSE Labs Senior Engineer and Linux Device Driver Project manager.

New additions in the boardroom will be Alan Cox, who requires no introduction, Ted T'so, the Linux Foundation Fellow and incoming Vice Chair for the board, and Thomas Gleixner, who "manages bug reports for NAND FLASH, core timers and the unified x86 architecture."

According to Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, "each member of the TAB personifies collaboration and works hard to help us increase the technical dominance of the Linux operating system." As for the Board itself, it "provides essential guidance to the Linux Foundation and its members."

Those who will continue personifying collaboration and providing essential guidance for the coming year are its current chair, James Bottomley of Novell, SCSI subsystem maintainer, Chris Maso of Oracle, Btrfs file system creator, Chris Wright of Red Hat, LSM framework maintainer, Kristen Carlson Accardi of Intel, ACPI, PCI, and SATA subsytem contributor, and Dave Jones of Red Hat, Fedora kernel maintainer.