CIQ Establishes Open Source Program Office, Names Chris Short as Head of Open Source

New OSPO deepens CIQ's investment in the open source ecosystem, building on commitment to Rocky Linux, OpenELA, RESF and more.

RENO, Nev., May 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and a leader in building high-performance software infrastructure, today announced the creation of its Open Source Program Office (OSPO). This new initiative formalizes and expands CIQ's commitment to open source software and community collaboration. Chris Short, a respected open source strategist and advocate, has been named head of open source to lead this effort.

Supporting the Health and Sustainability of Open Source

The CIQ OSPO is designed to bridge engineering, product and community needs by coordinating upstream contributions—such as those made recently to the Linux Kernel, Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG), and others—to ensure sustainable, secure software for customers. The team will work closely with open source projects, including Rocky Linux, Warewulf, Apptainer, Ascender and Ascender Ledger. The OSPO will also continue to drive collaboration with key open source foundations, including the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) and the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA).

"Our OSPO is both a resource and a place for action," said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ. "Downstream, we help internal teams stay informed and aligned on open source priorities. Upstream, we actively contribute—through engineering, documentation, governance and more—to help communities thrive. CIQ is built on open source, and this office is a stake in the ground to reaffirm and advance that commitment, starting today and building a strong future of support and commitment to our open source roots."

Chris Short to Lead CIQ's Open Source Strategy

CIQ has appointed Chris Short as its head of open source to lead the new OSPO. Short brings over a decade of experience in technical marketing, developer advocacy and community engagement, including high-impact roles at AWS and Red Hat.

"Advocating for our upstream communities is our primary responsibility; proving our value is a close second," said Short. "We want to ensure the health and long-term viability of the open source projects we rely on—and that means showing up with engineering contributions, governance support and consistent collaboration. I'm energized about this role at CIQ, because the company's leadership walks the talk when it comes to open source."

Most recently, Short served as senior developer advocate for open source strategy and marketing at Amazon Web Services, where he led the Kubernetes track at AWS re:Invent, built AWS Container Day at KubeCon EU, launched the EKS.news newsletter, and co-led the Kubernetes Contributor Comms team. Before AWS, Short held senior roles at Red Hat, where he produced over 700 hours of community-driven technical content and was a key advocate for hybrid platforms, Ansible and Kubernetes.

Read Short's blog post on what it means to be a true "open source company."

CIQ: Making Open Source Work for the Enterprise

CIQ's approach to open source is to make it more consumable, sustainable and validated for enterprises who rely on commercial guarantees. By combining open source principles with commercial support and SaaS-style offerings, CIQ helps customers modernize their IT stacks, accelerate innovation and reduce the risk of adopting open technologies.

"At CIQ, we believe that open source is not just a development model—it's an underlying culture," continued Kurtzer. "The OSPO is an investment in doing open source the right way, for the benefit of our customers, our communities and the ecosystem as a whole."

About CIQ
CIQ builds secure, reliable and performant software infrastructure solutions at scale, with dedicated world-class services for a range of performance-intensive computing and enterprise technologies. From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, high-end computing and cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack, enabling organizations to focus on their core competencies, driving business-transforming innovation. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack. For more information, please visit ciq.com.

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SOURCE CIQ