Philip Greenspun
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Philip Greenspun is a semi-retired American computer scientist, educator, and early internet entrepreneur who was a pioneer in developing online communities.
He is one of the founders of ICAD, Inc. and 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. Greenspun is also the author of Travels with Samantha, a photo-illustrated travelogue, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (Alex is Philip's samoyed dog), and Software Engineering for Internet Applications, the textbook for his MIT course. Greenspun's TCL-based community site LUSENET was an important early host of free forums.
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. Greenspun 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.
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 ArsDigita purchased back Greenspun's controlling share 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 December 2006 held an Airline Transport Pilot certificate with multi-engine, seaplane, and helicopter ratings as well as an FAA flight instructor's certificate with airplane instrument and helicopter ratings ([1]). Greenspun works as a flight instructor at East Coast Aero Club in Bedford, Massachusetts (Hanscom Air Force Base), teaching primary helicopter students and airplane instrument flying in glass cockpit aircraft. Greenspun has flown two factory-new Robinson helicopters from California back to Boston and has flown single-engine airplanes to the Arctic Ocean and the West Coast of Alaska, with Alex in the back seat.
When he is not flying airplanes and helicopters or traveling he teaches electrical engineering or computer science classes at MIT.
Greenspun 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.
