Moorcroft’s Joint Managing Partner and Head of Technology, Andrew Katz has been named on OpenUK’s Inaugural New Year’s Honours List for his contribution to Open Hardware.

The list recognises the 100 top Influencers across the UK’s Open Technology communities from Open Source Software, Open Hardware and Open Data, acknowledging their contributions to Open Technology whether through social media, their jobs, community contributions, policy or education.

Andrew is one of the UK’s leading free and open-source lawyers and renowned worldwide for his specialisms in Open Hardware. In 2020, he was nominated as the Open Hardware expert for the winning team for the European Union’s flagship policy research study on Open Source software and Open Hardware. He also drafted the popular Solderpad Open Hardware licence, and is on the core drafting team of the CERN Open Hardware Licence.

He regularly advises companies worldwide, including global multinationals, on issues relating to open source software and software supply chain compliance. Both Moorcrofts and Orcro are partners of the Linux Foundation’s OpenChain compliance programme, and Andrew is heavily involved in the development of OpenChain’s processes and materials, including the OpenChain specification which in December 2020 launched as an ISO standard: ISO/IEC 5230:2020.

Alongside Andrew Katz, the OpenUK list includes the likes of: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the world wide web – W3C, Mark Shuttleworth, Founder and CEO – Canonical and Jimmy Wales, Founder – Wikimedia.

Andrew Katz, said:

“I’m delighted and honoured to have been listed by OpenUK as one of the 100 influencers in Open Technology in the UK. It’s great to see so many fantastic people doing wonderful things for open source software, hardware and data in the UK and for OpenUK to recognise and acknowledge those efforts”.

Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK said:

“Andrew has been an instigator of our legal and policy group and we are very grateful to him for the commitment he has made. As we move through 2021 I am sure we will see these Influencers at work shaping the UK’s National Data and National Digital Strategies.”

The OpenUK 2021 Honours List, recognising the top 100 leaders in Open Technology can be accessed on the OpenUK’s website.