Philip
Greenspun is a semi-retired American
computer scientist, educator, and early
Internet entrepreneur who was a pioneer
in developing online communities.
Greenspun was born on September 28,
1963, grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and
received an S.B. in Mathematics from MIT
in 1982. After working for Hewlett
Packard Research Labs in Palo Alto and
Symbolics, he became a founder of ICAD,
Inc. Greenspun returned to MIT to study
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, eventually receiving a Ph.D.
Among software engineers, Greenspun is
known for his Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or
Fortran program contains an ad hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow
implementation of half of Common Lisp."
In 1993, Greenspun founded photo.net
(website: photo.net), an online
community for people helping each other
to improve their photographic skills. He
seeded the community with Travels with
Samantha, a photo-illustrated account of
a trip from Boston to Alaska and back,
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 Oracle-based
community site LUSENET was an important
early host of free forums.
After setting up the Hearst
Corporation's internet services and
building some early e-commerce sites
(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 of
directors. The venture capitalists sued
Greenspun and his co-founders in
Delaware Chancery Court over control of
the company, because they felt the
stockholder agreement prohibited
Greenspun's actions. 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.
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.
One of Greenspun's most famous students
is Randal Pinkett, who built an online
community for low-income housing
residents in Greenspun's 6.171 Software
Engineering for Internet Applications
course. Pinkett went on to win NBC TV
show The Apprentice.
In 2007, Greenspun donated $20,000 to
Wikimedia Foundation to start a fund for
the payment of illustrators to assist
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