Howard is the CTO of Symas Corporation and also currently Chief Architect of the OpenLDAP Project and has spoken at conferences across the US and Europe including Usenix/LISA events, UKUUG, Samba XP, LDAPCon (including LDAPCon 2009 which was co-sponsored by LinuxCon), etc. Howard is a prolific contributor to multiple open source projects, and has been writing free software since the early 1980s.