Masato Endo

Masato Endo serves as a Japan Evangelist for The Linux Foundation, appointed to its inaugural cohort in 2024. In this role, he works to accelerate open source community activities across industry, academia, and the public sector in Japan, seamlessly connecting them with the global ecosystem. In 2017, he co-founded the OpenChain Japan Work Group alongside Sony and Hitachi, where he continues to lead its Promotion Sub Group—now one of the most active regional OpenChain communities in the world. Building on this experience, he founded the Automotive Work Group of the OpenChain Project in 2019 and continues to serve as its Chair. More recently, in 2024, he co-founded the OSPO Expert Group of Automotive Grade Linux and currently serves as its Co-Leader.

In his corporate capacity at Toyota Motor Corporation, Masato drives technology and service development initiatives in the value chain services domain, while also having led the establishment of TOYOTA OSPO in January 2024 as one of the first OSPOs in the Japanese automotive industry. As its Group Manager, he leads efforts to promote open source adoption and governance through cross-organizational collaboration.

Originally trained as an intellectual property professional, Masato joined Toyota in 2005 and has built a distinguished career at the intersection of IP strategy, open source governance, and software supply chain transparency, with a particular focus on SBOM and ISO/IEC 5230 compliance. He has also dedicated significant effort to mitigating open source IP risks for enterprises, and serves as a Technical Committee Member of the Open Invention Network (OIN), the world's largest patent non-aggression community in support of Linux and open source software.

Expanding his impact beyond the private sector, Masato actively contributes to national projects and policy initiatives led by the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and other government bodies. He speaks frequently at international conferences on OSPO, OpenChain, and the future of open source in the automotive industry, and has also delivered lectures and talks at leading institutions including Harvard University, the University of Tokyo, and Keio University.

Committed to fostering international collaboration, Masato was selected as a Delegate of the US-Japan Leadership Program in 2022, through which he continues to build bridges between Japan and the global community.