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 share their work with other programmers, who could copy it, redistribute it, and modify it. This licensing method took away a lot…

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 doing new things and connecting with each other. And so I built a bunch of companies on the internet, or using the internet, with the idea…

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 enormous. What we need to do, however, is to be able to access it. One of the frustrations that many…

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 very competitive as to whose voice is being heard.

Bloomsbury Academic is a very new imprint. We started it last September and the business model…

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 deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad…

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 that the commons was a way of protecting shared resources and using them in ways that the market didn’t. In…

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 properties that were focused on the interest of consumers going green. We felt that there was something missing,…

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 terms, helps with how to do things, and offers tips and tricks.

We publish one pattern a week, or one sewing project a week,…

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 legally, and patent law is stifling innovation; for example, science isn’t going to be as powerful…

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 ideas behind it, and I liked the ideals behind open source and free software. That lead…