Matt Asay has announced that after only ten months he has officially resigned from Canonical. Asay, after leaving Alfresco joined Canonical in February of this year as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). He confirmed that he will be taking a senior business development position at early-stage HTML5 startup Strobe "to focus on building the open web".

In a post on his Canonical blog, Asay says that he "greatly missed day-to-day interaction with customers and partners. I miss being in the trenches", adding that, "What I love is to be knee-deep in customer issues. I love growing a business, customer reference by customer reference". At Strobe, Asay will be working with developers to build "impressive apps" using the open source SproutCore HTML5 application framework. Asay admits that leaving Canonical was "hardest decision of my career, even harder than my decision to leave Alfresco", and notes that he has never before left an employer in such a short time. The 17th of December will be Asay's last day at Canonical.

Asay has been involved in open source since 1998 and is known for his pragmatic position of software freedom, balancing the needs of companies and communities, as well as his sometimes controversial blogging. He has previously worked at Lineo, an embedded Linux start-up, helped found Novell's Linux Business Office, founded the Open Source Business Conference and is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative.

See also:

(crve)