Sage Weil
Sage Weil earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC Santa Cruz in 2007.

Sage Weil’s UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. thesis became the basis for a remarkable career; it spawned an open-source software product that became a formidable force in the marketplace.

Since then, Weil has given back to the campus that helped set the groundwork for his future achievements; Weil’s gift of $2.5 million leveraged $500,000 in matching funds from the UC Office of the President to establish the Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software. In addition, his gift will provide operating support for research in open-source software led by professor of computer science Carlos Maltzahn, who directs the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at UC Santa Cruz.

The purpose of CROSS, Maltzahn said, is to enable more UC Santa Cruz students to do what Weil did and develop their graduate thesis projects or undergraduate senior projects into successful open-source software projects with vibrant user and developer communities.

“CROSS is bridging the gap between student research and open-source software projects,” Maltzahn said.

Maltzahn and Scott Brandt, professor of computer science and now vice chancellor for research at UC Santa Cruz, supervised Weil’s thesis research.

“Sage did something really pretty extraordinary, and this is a wonderful way for him to help other students potentially achieve what he did,” Brandt said.