Philip Greenspun
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Philip Greenspun is a retired computer scientist who was a pioneer in developing online communities. When he is not flying airplanes and helicopters or traveling he teaches electrical engineering or computer science classes at MIT. He is the founder of photo.net (website: photo.net), a web site for sharing and discussing photography. He gained early notoriety as an outspoken Internet programmer and travel photographer. After building several other websites (including one for MIT Press), he released a free software toolkit called the ArsDigita Community System, built on top of AOLserver and Oracle. Philip started a company to sell support and service contracts for the toolkit, which remained free, and grew ArsDigita to about $20 million in revenue before taking a venture capital investment.
Philip is also the author of Travels with Samantha (http://www.photo.net/samantha/), a photo-illustrated travelogue, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/) (Alex is Philip's samoyed dog), and Software Engineering for Internet Applications (http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/), the textbook for his MIT course.
Philip and his co-founders started a non-profit foundation that ran the ArsDigita Prize, an award for young web developers, and the ArsDigita University, a tuition-free one-year program teaching the core Computer Science curriculum, one course at a time.
A few months after the $38 million venture capital deal closed the investors pushed Greenspun out of the company. About six months later Greenspun and his co-founders, unhappy with the financial performance of the company, used their stock ownership to vote themselves back on the Board. The VCs sued Greenspun and his co-founders in Delaware Chancery Court, hoping to gain control of the company despite their minority stock ownership position. The case was dismissed after Greenspun sold his controlling share of ArsDigita for $7.6 million (according to Eve Andersson). ArsDigita was dissolved about eight months later, with some of the assets being acquired by Red Hat.
After the settlement, Greenspun learned to fly and, as of June 2005 held an FAA commercial pilot's certificate with instrument, multi-engine, seaplane, and helicopter ratings as well as an FAA flight instructor's certificate.
Greenspun is also well-known as the source of Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming.
External Links
- Philip Greenspun's homepage (http://philip.greenspun.com/)
- Philip Greenspun's weblog (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/)
ArsDigita Histories
- Philip Greenspun (http://www.waxy.org/random/arsdigita/)
- Lars Pind (http://www.pinds.com/lars/goodbye-arsdigita)
- Eve Andersson (http://www.eveandersson.com/arsdigita-history)
- Michael Yoon (http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita)