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Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS)

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project’s leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation. The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

Dr Felipe Prez Marti

Former Minister Planning, Venezuela. Academician working on Economic model of Free Software. Dr Felipe is a world renowned economist and free software activist from Venezuela. During his tenure as Minister of Planning and Development of Venezuela, he promoted the free software movement in the Venezuela government. Under his leadership, the free software movement in Venezuela was able to convince the Venezuela government to promote free software in a big way. Venezuela became the first country to mandate free software in public sector institutions in the country.

Dr Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is an Open Source Initiative board member. Amongst other things, he is Founding International and Managing Editor of peer-reviewed journal First Monday, and Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT. He has undertaken several studies on free software, which he terms “FLOSS” – an alternative term for free software which he is credited with coining.

His work helps reshape the global understanding of FLOSS, including in the academic world.

Joost Smiers

Joost Smiers is a political scientist. His research concerns always the social, economic and cultural conditions for the creation, production, performance, distribution, screening, promotion and reception of the arts, including of course entertainment and design, on global, regional, national and local levels.

Joost Smiers is a leading expert on decision-making in cultural matters and new approaches to cultural and intellectual property. He is perhaps best known for his proposals to eliminate copyright and to break up large publishers, music producers, and movie studios in order to encourage cultural diversity and eliminate market dominance by a small number of corporations.

Smiers received his Ph.D.in Political Science in 1977 from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science of the Arts and a Research Fellow in the Research Group Arts & Economics at the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Netherlands, where he served as Professor from 1985 until his retirement in 2007. He is Dutch and lives in Amsterdam. He speaks Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

He is a member of the AHRB Research Network on New Directions in Copyright Law, Birckbeck School of Law, University of London. He was a member of the board of trustees of ERICArts, the European Research Institute for Comparative Cultural Affairs and the Arts, and an expert for the Council of Europe in Moldova.

Alan Story

Alan Story is the chair of the Copy South research group. He is currently senior lecturer in law at the Kent law school. From 1984-1990 he was a political journalist for the Toronto Star.

The main research topics are on Intellectual property, especially critical approaches to Patent and Copyright Law. The theory of Intellectual Property. Copyright issues in the global South.

Carolina Botero

Roberto Verzola

Roberto Verzola is today a sustainable agriculture campaigner (formerly Secretary-General) of Philippine Greens, a political formation based on the principles of ecology, social justice, self-determination, and non-violence. He is the first Filipino to set up the first email service for NGOs in the Philippines.

Roberto Verzola got involved in campaigns and policy studies on nuclear power, renewable energy, energy efficiency, information technology, genetic engineering, intellectual property rights, organic farming, environmental issues, with special attention on technology issues and their social and environmental impact, in cooperation with various advocacy groups and social movements, since the 80s.

He is the author of “Towards a Political Economy of Information” (FNS, march 2004).
 

Fatima Lasay

Fatima Lasay (b. 1969) is an artist, writer/researcher and independent curator working in digital media. She is interested in articulations of aesthetic equilibrium in kaluluwa (knowledge), wika (language) and ginhawa (body). Her work deals with the social and political dimensions of technologies. Lasay was artist-in-residence in Yangon, Myanmar (2004) and Sierre, Switzerland (2004), and has been awarded grants to collaborate and present her work in Europe and Asia. Lasay is author of the chapter “Tanaw: Seeing and Shaping the World in the Philippine Landscape” for the book “Tanaw: Perspectives on the BSP Painting Collection” published by the Central Bank of the Philippines (2005), and “No Carrier and Other Stories from Philippine BBS Culture” for the book “Read_Me: Software Art and Cultures”published by the Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, Denmark (2004). Lasay was professor of industrial design, computer art and art theory (1996-2004) at the University of the Philippines where she developed its first computer art electives and organized the Digital Media Festivals (2000-2003). Lasay also serves as member of the editorial advisory board of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press).

Eben Moglen

 Eben Moglen is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, whose client list includes numerous pro bono clients, such as the Free Software Foundation.
Moglen started out as a computer programming language designer and then received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1980, where he won the Hicks Prize for Literary Criticism. In 1985, he received a master’s degree in philosophy and a JD from Yale University. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia since 1987.

Moglen serves as a director of the Public Patent Foundation.

Moglen was part of Philip Zimmermann’s defense team, when Zimmermann was being investigated over the export of Pretty Good Privacy, a public key encryption system, under US export laws.

In 2003 he received the EFF Pioneer Award. In February 2005, he founded the Software Freedom Law Center.

Moglen is closely involved with the Free Software Foundation, serving as general counsel since 1994 and board member from 2000 to 2007. As counsel, Moglen was charged with enforcing the GNU General Public License on behalf of the FSF, and later became heavily involved with drafting version 3 of the GPL. On April 23, 2007 he announced in a blog post that he would be stepping down from the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen stated that after the GPLv3 Discussion Draft 3 had been released, he wanted to devote more time to writing, teaching, and the Software Freedom Law Center.

Subbiah Arunachalam

Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) is an information consultant based in Chennai in South India. He has been associated with the Indian academic and scholarly communities for over three decades.

He has been an editor of scientific journals (Indian Journal of Technology, Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research, Indian Journal of Chemistry, Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and Pramana – Journal of Physics), a science writer, a researcher in chemistry, a teacher of information science, a librarian in a national laboratory, the executive secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the editorial boards of scientific journals.
 
Currently he is a Distinguished Fellow in the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and a part-time Visiting Professor in the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. His research interests include science on the periphery, scientometrics, and information access. He has recently completed a literature-based study on mapping science in India. He has more than 40 papers to his credit and is on the editorial boards of six refereed international journals. He has delivered more than twenty invited talks in international conferences. His forte is his knowledge and understanding of the Indian scientific and scholarly community and their work. He is a member of both the Indian and the International Science Writers Associations.

In a post made in 2003 Stevan Harnad, who is also a leading light in the global Open Access movement, called Arunachalam “India’s and the Developing World’s great advocate for open access”. Arunachalam had then been named as Co-Director of the CogPrints Archive.

Stefan Merten

Stefan Merten (Kaiserslautern, Germany) works as a computer scientist and software engineer. He has been engaged in the political scene in several ways since 1989 (it was by chance that it was in 1989 – and not the result of the fall of the Berlin wall).
 
In the summer of 1999 he founded and is currently maintaining Projekt Oekonux, which explores the possibilities of free software to lead to a form of production beyond capitalism. The project offers a virtual space where different people with different opinions and different methods for studying the socio-economic and socio-political forms of Free Software and other peer production phenomena.

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.

Bauwens is the author of a number of on-line essays, including a seminal thesis Peer to Peer and Human Evolution and The Political Economy of Peer Production. He is editor of Pluralities-Integration|Pluralities/Integration newsletter.

He now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he created the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He has taught courses on the anthropology of digital society to postgraduate students at ICHEC/St. Louis in Brussels, Belgium and related courses at Payap University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

NIIBE Yutaka

NIIBE Yutaka is the chairman of the Free Software Initiative of Japan (FSIJ), a long-time Debian developer, and a hacker to the core.

Carlos Figueira

Carlos Figueira Eloy Rodriguez is the chairman of the National Center for Information Technology (CNTI), an agency under the Ministry of People’s Power for Telecommunications and Information Technology (MTI)(Venezuela). He is an engineer who graduated from the Electronic Simón Bolívar University (1983), with a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2003) and Master of Computer Science (1994) in the same house of studies.

Notably, also part of the group of Research in High Performance Computing and Networking, the USB. Conducted research in the area of tools for application programming in real time, parallel and distributed programming, evaluation of performance and high performance computing.

Along with other professionals, is coordinator of the research project “Participation in Consulting and technology transfer derived from the installation of computer clusters and definition, adaptation, development and deployment architectures, protocols and interfaces, standards-based Free Software Middleware Grid in PDVSA “USB / PDVSA-AIT (March 2006 – December 2008).

Marco Ciurcina

Italian lawyer, admitted to the bar in 1994. He has gained considerable experience especially in the field of commercial and Italian and international contractual law.

Since 1994 he has been working in the field of Information Technology law, Copyright, Patent and Trademark law. Course Administrator of the Master Program in IP jointly organized by the University of Turin and WIPO Academy. He is a member of Hipatia. and is actively committed to the free software and free knowledge movements. He teaches “Law and ethics of communication” at the Politecnico di Torino, Faculty of Information Science.

Juan Carlos Gentile

Free Software activists from Uruguay, founder and president of Hipatia. Hipatia is an international organisation for Promotion of free software and Free knowledge initiatives.

He is a musician turned free software activist, Juan is involved with various community initiatives like Red Escolar GNU/Linux. Juan plays an important role in linking free software activist groups across Latin America. He is one of the founding members of Hipatia, an international organisation working to promote Free Software and Free Knowledge. In the field of music, his focus is on electronic music production.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal “Jimbo” Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free open content encyclopedia launched in 2001. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, holding the board-appointed “community founder” seat. In 2004, he founded Wikia, a privately owned free web hosting service.

His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people. Wales is the de facto leader of Wikipedia, whose role in the project has gained broad media attention and has led to controversy

Neville “Roy” Singham

Roy Singham is founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc. With more than 20 years of technology and executive management experience, Roy is a globally-renowned information technology thought leader. He has authored technology-related columns in various industry publications, and is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide. Roy and ThoughtWorks are recognized experts in Enterprise Architecture, Agile development, large scale software development including highly distributed teams, Open Source Software, Ruby, .NET and Web Services.

Rajeev Karwal

Rajeev Karwal is one of India’s top names in retail business.He has worked in India and abroad with companies like LG, Philips, Onida and Electrolux. After stepping down from the post of President & CEO, of the Consumer Durables Vertical of Reliance Retail he founded Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions to help the Micro Small and Medium Enterprises with its unique ‘Venture Catalyst’ approach.

Currently,

National Chair, India Integrity Campaign at YI, CII

Angel Member at Indian Angel Network

National Incubation Chair (Hon.), at National Innovation Foundation of India

On Board of Advisors of Entrepreneurship Development Cell ,IIT Delhi.

Georg Greve

Georg C. F. Greve (Helgoland, Germany) is initiator and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

His responsibilities include European/Global coordination and planning for the FSF (Europe), supporting the local representatives in their work, working on political and legal issues as well as projects and giving speeches or informing journalists to spread knowledge about free software.

In 1993 he discovered free software, the GNU Project and Linux. In 1998, he was the European speaker for the GNU Project and began writing the “Brave GNU World”, a monthly column on free computer software featuring interesting GNU projects each month.

In early 2001, he initiated the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE or FSF Europe), the first Free Software Foundation outside the United States of America and, as of 2007, the only transnational Free Software Foundation.

Greve was invited as an expert to the “Commission on Intellectual Property Rights” of the UK government, and represented the coordination circle of German Civil Society during the first phase of the United Nations (UN) World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as part of the German governmental delegation.

He has also networked with the Civil Society working groups on European level as well as for the thematic working group on patents, copyrights, trademarks (PCT) and free software.
 

Binod PG

Binod P.G is an architect in the Application Server development team and is working on Project SailFin. He is also a co-specification lead of the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6 Expert Group. In the past, he was involved in the development of many areas of the glassfish applicaton server, including Java EE Service Engine, Server Startup, Connector 1.5, JDBC, Connection Pool and JMS provider integration. He is also one of the owners of Generic Resource Adapter for JMS project.

Jacob Royal

Jacob Royal has a masters degree in IT (MTech IT) and an MBA in Information Systems. He has around 9 years of experience in IT including 3 years of stay at Sun Microsystems. His wide experience in IT includes product/application design, software development, testing, writing and leading teams. He identified new tools and developed code and writing standards for various companies including Lucent Technologies and Autodesk before joining Sun. He is also a co-author of Java SE 6 Tutorial book fourth edition. Currently, he is working with IPG group of Sun Microsystems, Bangalore on Java SE deployment technologies.

Frank Jennings

Frank Jennings works in the Information Products Group of Sun Microsystems Inc. He has more than 9 years of experience in Java, SOA and System Design. He is an Electronics Engineer from Madras University and has worked for several open source projects. Frank has written regular columns for leading Java journals including Java Developer’s Journal and Linux Developer’s Week. Frank is also the co-author of the book SOA Approach to Integration focusing on SOA design pattern for enterprises. Frank also is involved in the technical publication of Sun Microsystems in the fi elds of Solaris and Developer AMP Stack.He also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Science and an Advance Diploma in Computer Integrated Management from University of Indianapolis.

Senthil Prabhu

Senthil Prabhu brings over 3 ½ years of experience to his position as Software Engineer in SUN. Senthil joined SUN in 2006 and has been working almost exclusively with integration technologies. Senthil has been contributing to the OpenESB community since its inception and has presented demos on it in various opensource and technical conferences.

Surendran

Started career at ECIL’s Computer Group in 1971. Successfully delivered software products and projects requiring significant technical skill and team efforts. Was involved in design, development and successful marketing of Integra4 RDBMS at CoSoft India. Current assignment is with Xtremedata Inc. dveloping a high performance database appliance for high-speed SQL processing against multi-terrabyte databases using hardware accelerated multi-node parallel processing system running enhanced PostgeSQL.

Anand Babu

Author/maintainer for Free Software projects like GNU FreeIPMI, Hymn (AKA PlayFair), GNU Freetalk, Gluster, Freehoo, bios-config, librpci (kernel debugger for the GNU Hurd). Much of time goes into writing Free Software for the GNU project. Other community services involved are the VOWC.org project and Ecomwel.org.

Led the engineering team of CaliforniaDigital that built worlds second fastest super computer (code named “Thunder”) entirely out of free software in June 2004. As a part of day time job, hack free software such as driver development, porting, performance/scalability enhancements and bug fixing. Mainly GNU and Linux kernel.Have built and managed engineering organizations.Have developed and ported custom server/cluster/embedded GNU/Linux distributions. Love to troubleshoot things that are left impossible by others and is known for fixing them at record timings.Have worked closely with the sales team making IBM, HP and Sun lose consistently in all cluster and super-computing deals. Packaged free software, open standards and commodity hardware with robust manageability solution, that helped companies like GE and Synopsys confidently migrate from their proprietary RISC/Unix platforms.

Board member of FSF-India. Cofounder and CTO of Z RESEARCHl Inc.

Previously was Vice President of Engineering and CTO for CDC Linux and California Digital Inc.
 

Prabhu Ramachandran

Prabhu Ramachandran is a member of the faculty at the department of aerospace engineering, IIT Bombay. He is  an alumnus from the department of aerospace engineering, IIT Madras.

His research interests include vortex methods and particle methods for computational fluid dynamics and scientific computing. He is an advocate of Free and Open Source software and in his spare time develop some free/open software.

In 1998, Prabhu Ramachandran and Arun Krishnaswamy informally started the Indian Linux Users Group Chennai chapter(ILUGC).

Some free software packages authored by him are,
• MayaVi — MayaVi is a powerful scientific data visualizer that is written in 100% pure Python and uses VTK
• TVTK — TVTK is an open source and Python friendly wrapper around the popular VTK visualization and graphics library.
• MayaVi2 — MayaVi2 (M2) is the next generation of MayaVi and is part of the Enthought Tool Suite.
• Ygl_script : This provides Python, Perl and Tcl bindings for the Ygl library along with a simple wrapper class that allows one to do a rubber-band zoom using the mouse.

• LaTeX class for dissertations submitted to IIT-M — This tarball provides a LaTeX class along with a simple template thesis and synopsis.

   

Vihang Pathak

Vihang Pathak has been a member of the technical staff at Sun’s India Engineering Center in Bangalore since 2004. He is currently engaged in development of some upcoming features in the Portal Server. He also blogs on a variety of topics.

Vihang Pathak has 9+ years of software development experience in product development/domains like Portal, Mobility, Content Delivery,Payment Systems and Security.  He has been working in the Sun Portal Development engineering team in various areas including SOA, Enterprise Mashups and Project WebSynergy. Open Source Project Lead, Portlet Community lead, Talk and presentations at Sun Tech Days, Field Presentations are some of the miscellaneous roles taken up by him in the portal engineering team.

Ramkumar Ramalingam

Ramkumar Ramalingam is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in IBM Software Labs, Bangalore India. He is now a committer of Apache Tuscany open source project working on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) runtime. He holds a degree of B.E in Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering. He has an experience of around 8 years in IT industry. Prior to this role he was a key developer for WebSphere Application Server products since 2004.

Vamsavardhana Reddy

Vamsavardhana Reddy is an Advisory Software Engineer working with IBM India Private Limited since 1996 and has over 12 years experience in the IT industry. He is a committer on Apache Geronimo and Apache Tuscany projects and member of the Apache Geronimo PMC.

Harshad Oak

Harshad Oak the founder of Rightrix Solutions and editor IndicThreads.com. He is the author of 3 internationally acclaimed books on Java technology and several articles. Harshad has a master’s degree in computer management from Symbiosis, India and is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Web Component Developer.

Vivek Prahlad

Vivek Prahlad is an IT professional with 8 years of industry experience. He joined
ThoughtWorks Inc. in 2003 after a stint at i2 Technologies, where he led the
development of i2’s scheduling products. He currently leads the development team for Twist, ThoughtWorks Studios testing software product. The team is charged with
taking test automation to the next level.

Vivek Prahlad is an IT professional with 8 years of industry experience. He joined
ThoughtWorks Inc. in 2003 after a stint at i2 Technologies, where he led the development of i2’s scheduling products. He currently leads the development team for
Twist, ThoughtWorks Studios testing software product. The team is charged with
taking test automation to the next level.