Danese has been involved (since 1999) in developing and evangelizing the Open Source movement and its attached methodologies: including release of some very key open source projects while at Sun such as Apache Tomcat, OpenOffice.org, JXTA.org, NetBeans.org, GridEngine.org, GlassFish, OpenSolaris and growing interest/participation in the Social Software movement, including implementation and launch of the original java.net and blogs.sun.com. More recently Danese worked for four years at Intel as Sr. Director of Open Source Strategies, and she has just completed a tour of serving as CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) and 10 years on the Board of the Open Source Initiative. She is also a Member of the Apache Software Foundation and an advisor to the Mozilla Foundation

Danese is also co-editor of the book, Open Sources v2.0 and a reviewing editor of the Art of Community, both from O'Reilly Media.

She believes that the "Open Source Methodology of increased transparency in software development (and possibly also in hardware development) can only have a positive effect on the technology we deliver to customers. The marriage of Open Source to traditional software development has created some interesting hybrid (part Open part Proprietary) models which I believe hold up favorably against entirely traditional methods in both time to market and satisfaction of market demand."