Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.
I had been watching the growth of the free and open source software movements for a few years, and I was thinking about people coming together and collaborating. What was really making that world possible is that people devised these licenses that allow, for example, programmers to...
Joi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons.
My entrepreneurial life happened when the internet started. And I think the biggest difference between my entrepreneurial life and the entrepreneurial life of some other people is the internet is all about—as David Weinberger would say—small pieces smoothly joined, and about people...
Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist, a reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.
I’m a chemist. I’m very interested in how the enormous amount of information that’s being put on the web can be used for science. The possibilities of doing things with that information are...
Frances Pinter is the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic.
In academic publishing, the volume of what is published has increased phenomenally in recent years, because the higher education sector has increased globally quite a lot; there are more academics, more people writing, and so more material is coming out. And its all...
Curt Smith is a musician and a co-founder of Tears for Fears.
I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old—next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign...
David Bollier is the co-founder of Public Knowledge, author most recently of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, and the editor of OntheCommons.org.
I spent many years in Washington, mostly in the public interest community, with Ralph Nader and the head of the auto safety agency. Over time I came to see...
Andrew Shapiro is the founder and president of GreenYour, an online resources for sharing facts, tips, and products about sustainable living.
My colleagues and I have been working in the green business space for some time, but a number of us have backgrounds in IT and the internet, and so we started looking at the landscape of web...
Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Von Karaisl are co-founders of Burda Style, an online resource and community for modern sewing.
Burda Style is an open door sewing platform. We offer copyright-free sewing patterns that you can download and print out. Around the sewing patterns you find a community and a "Sew-pedia" that explains sewing...
Jesse Dylan is a filmmaker, commercial director, and creator of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" music video.
The benefit of the internet and how things are distributed now is that you are exposed to more than you ever have been before. The downside is that much of it is heavily copyrighted. With current copyright law, it’s hard to use anything...
Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Google.
I’ve been a programmer since I was 12 years old, so I always knew I would get into computers, computer science, or information technology. I started using Linux when I was in college back in 1995. Then as my professional career developed I realized I really liked Linux and the...
