Georg C. F. Greve

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Georg C. F. Greve (born March 10, 1973 in 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.

He spends most of his time travelling and when travelling to give a talk he often stays a few days in the host country to meet the members of the local Free Software organisations and community.

Georg Greve has his "Diplom" Physicist with biophysics, physical oceanography and astronomy as minor fields of study from the computer science department of the University of Hamburg. His interdisciplinary diploma thesis was written in the field of nanotechnology.

Greve's first software development was when he was 12 years old. Hhis first publication of a program was in a professional journal in 1991, it partly financed his studies when he managed the software development to evaluate SQUID-sensor data in the biomagnetometic laboratory in the University hospital of Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg, Germany.

In 1993 he discovered the use of free software and GNU/Linux. In 1998, he was the European speaker for the GNU Project and began writing the "Brave GNU World," a monthly column on free software published on the Internet in as many as 10 languages, and in international magazines including the German Linux-Magazin.

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.