Congratulations to Basil Cousins on his well deserved award by OpenUK.
Basil and I first met in the early 1980’s when I was at ICL (now Fujitsu) and he was a senior customer. Even then he was a strong advocate for interoperability and went on to lead much of X/Open’s work in this area. Later we worked together on Unix International in the UK, but it was only in 2001/2 when, realising we both were looking at the business opportunity from Open Source, we combined efforts. The result was our co-founding of what became OpenForum Europe – the rest is history. Our colleague Shane Coughlan has written a more detailed blogpost and it underlines his credibility, the long term value and the friendships he has created.
All of us at OFE are delighted with his award and when restrictions allow we will raise a glass of good quality red wine to celebrate.