Brian Behlendorf, primary developer of the Apache Web Server, co-founder of the world’s first dedicated commercial web site creation company and a member of the Mozilla board has joined the World Economic Forum as the organization’s CTO, he announced on Twitter this morning.
The World Economic Forum hosts an annual meeting of international economic players in Davos, Switzerland and issues a number of massive econometric reports detailing the development conditions in the various countries around the world. The organization regularly engages with emerging web technology, from actively hosting bloggers at its conference to highlighting tech startups around the world to considering inclusion of social-media censorship and freedom among its considerations when evaluating countries’ preparedness for economic development. Those evaluations make or break huge international investments. The addition of Behlendorf as the organization’s CTO is being celebrated around Twitter as a good move for the organization’s relationship with the open web.
The World Economic Forum has also faced extensive criticism as a pompous gathering of elitist international agents of economic exploitation and their non-profit, do-gooder, hangers-on.
Behlendorf, aged 37, was told by game programming supernerd Alex Rosenberg on Twitter that “I can’t tell if that’s awesome or if you’re now ‘The Man.'” Behlendorf replied that “the answer is yes and yes.”
