PayPal has hired programmer, computer scientist, and open source champion Danese Cooper as its first head of open source.
The eBay unit is increasingly turning to open source as it revamps its technology platform, recently tapping OpenStack for its private cloud and open sourcing its node.js application framework, kraken.
"Moving our frontend application framework into the public sphere was a major step for us as a company in not only giving back to the node community through our contribution, but in engaging with the external engineering community in a new way," says Kirsten Wolberg, VP, technology business operations.
The firm is promising to take its newfound enthusiasm further through the hiring of Cooper, who joins after stints as chief open source evangelist at Sun and CTO of Wikimedia Foundation.
Cooper also spent a decade on the board of the Open Source Initiative, and is a current board member with the Drupal Association and the Open Source Hardware Association.
Says Wolberg: "The addition of Danese to our PayPal team strengthens our world-class engineering organisation. She will work to help us deploy best-in-class open source technology across our stack and drive contributions back to open source projects to increase our technical impact globally."