Presenters/Rishab Aiyer Ghosh/Biography

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh first developed and sold free software in 1994. He switched from writing in C and assembly to English, and has been writing about the economics of free software and collaborative production since 1994.

He is Founding International and Managing Editor of First Monday, the most widely read peer-reviewed on-line journal of the Internet, and Senior Researcher at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) at the University of Maastricht and United Nations University, the Netherlands. In 1997, he co-authored tools to measure contributions by free software developers by analysing source code, pioneering now widely used research techniques. In 2000 he coordinated the European Union -funded FLOSS project, the most comprehensive early study of free/libre/open source users and developers; the follow-on FLOSSPOLS project on government policy support; and the on-going FLOSSWorld project conducting comparative studies worldwide. He is involved in government policy initiatives on free software and open standards, and conducts research funded by the European Union and the US National Science Foundation. He was a co-author and initial signatory to the Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO and involved in the early drafting of the Access To Knowledge (A2K) Treaty. In 2005, he published CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy with MIT Press. Rishab was elected a board member of the Open Source Initiative, which maintains the Open Source Definition.

Rishab speaks on free software, access to knowledge and collaborative production at several events each month.