Nationality Germany Education University of Hamburg Role Software developer | Name Georg F. Alma mater University of Hamburg | |
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Born 10 March 1973 (age 51) ( 1973-03-10 ) Helgoland, Germany Occupation CEO and Chairman of the Board of Kolab Systems, Founding President (until 2009) and Director at FSFE Organizations founded Free Software Foundation Europe | ||
Georg C. F. Greve (born 10 March 1973 in Helgoland, Germany) is a self-taught software developer, academically trained physicist and author. He has been working on technology politics since 2001 when he founded the Free Software Foundation Europe.
Greve has been working full-time as president for FSFE since early 2001. In June 2009 he handed over the presidency of the FSFE to Karsten Gerloff. His responsibilities for FSFE included coordination of the General Assembly, supporting 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.
In addition, Georg Greve also worked as a consultant, representing Google in the OOXML standardisation process at ISO and as a project reviewer for the European Commission.
Greve is married and currently lives in Switzerland.
In 2010 Greve was awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstkreuz am Bande).
Career
Greve has a degree of Physics in biophysics, with 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 on scanning probe microscopy.
Greve's first software development was when he was 12 years old. His first publication of a program was in a professional journal in 1992. He partly financed his studies when he managed the software development to evaluate SQUID-sensor data in the biomagnetometic laboratory at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany.
In 1993 he came across free software, the GNU Project and Linux. In 1998, he was the European speaker for the GNU Project and began writing the "Brave GNU World", a monthly column on free computer software featuring interesting GNU projects each month. It was published on the Internet in as many as ten languages, and in international printed magazines including the German Linux-Magazin. The name Brave GNU World is a reference to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World.
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.
Since 2009 he got the position of a CEO in Kolab Systems AG in Zürich, Switzerland, the developers behind the Kolab server. Since 2010 he is also the President of the Board.