"It is truly my pleasure to join SpikeSource's board of directors," said Bill Joy last week, as SpikeSource announced that the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who led Sun's technical strategy as the chief scientist from the company's inception in 1982 until 2003, had joined the company's board of directors.

SpikeSource also last week hired two new executives to oversee core business areas - Joaquin Ruiz as vice president of product marketing and Anders Tjernlund as vice president of support services.

"It's evident that open source applications have progressed to the point they are ready for widespread enterprise adoption and that SpikeSource offers a suite of services that will help enterprises effectively and efficiently adopt and maintain open source software," said Joy.

"The SpikeSource board of directors and I are pleased to announce these additions to our board and executive team," said SpikeSource's CEO Kim Polese. "By assembling this robust team we are able to deliver unparalleled value to our customers as we help them navigate the adoption of open source applications into their IT infrastructures."

Joy played a key role in the development of Solaris, SPARC, chip architectures and pipelines, and Java. He joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in January 2005.

As the vice president of product marketing, Joaquin Ruiz will be responsible for SpikeSource's product strategy. Anders Tjernlund joins meantime will leverage his experience as the senior director of worldwide support operations and strategy at BEA systems to develop SpikeSource's support services. He will be managing the global customer support team, developing support services, working with customers to fulfill their services contracts, and building out SpikeSource's online support offerings.