(This post originally appeared on my personal blog. I wanted to make sure Appcelerant readers saw the good news as well.)

Yesterday, we announced that Larry Augustin had joined the advisory board of Appcelerator.

Larry has been working with us for awhile now and we thought it was time to formalize our relationship.

Larry is probably one of the most well respected thought leaders, angel investors and business executives in open source. Larry literally was one of the main figures behind the rise of open source…especially as it relates to open source as a business.

Larry has been involved in open source for more than 20 years. Most notably, he founded VA Linux (now Sourceforge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he launched SourceForge.net, the world’s largest open source software development community. He led the company through an IPO in 1999. Also at VA, he acquired Andover.net, merging SourceForge.net, Linux.com, Slashdot, and other well-known Open Source Internet sites to form the Open Source Development Network (OSDN). Larry holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Larry currently is an investor and/or board member to SugarCRM, Hyperic, Fonality, Pentaho, Compiere, Medsphere, Springsource, Mulesource, Zend, WS02 and a few others. He was also a director at JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat (NYSE: RHAT) for $420M and Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) for $500M.

Larry will continue to help us focus our efforts on growing our open source community around rich Internet applications (RIA) as we pioneer a path toward bringing rapid open source RIA development to the enterprise market.

Welcome aboard, Larry.

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