Benjamin Mako Hill
Benjamin Mako Hill
Born	(1980-12-02) December 2, 1980 (age 32)
Residence	Somerville, Massachusetts[1]
Occupation	Researcher
Employer	MIT Sloan School of Management
Spouse(s)	Mika Matsuzaki (2006-present)
Website
mako.cc

Benjamin Mako Hill (born December 2, 1980) is a Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the author of two best-selling technical books on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible ^[2] and The Official Ubuntu Book ^[3] He currently serves as a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors.^[4]

Biography [edit]

Hill has a Master's degree from the MIT Media Lab and is a PhD candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he studies free software communities and business models. In fall 2013, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington.^[5] He is also a Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media where he coordinates the development of software for civic organizing. He has worked as an advisor and contractor for the One Laptop per Child project. He is a speaker for the GNU Project,^[6] and serves on the board of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day). Since 2006 he is married to Mika Matsuzaki, having used mathematically constrained wedding vows at the marriage ceremony.^[7]

Debian [edit]

Since 1999, Hill has been an active member of Debian. He has served as a delegate of the Debian Project Leader, managing money and equipment, and is a founder and coordinator of Debian Non-Profit,^[8] a Debian custom distribution designed to fill the needs of small non-profit organizations. In addition he served on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006,^[9][10] serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004.^[11]

Ubuntu [edit]

Hill is also a core-developer and founding member of Ubuntu, and continues to be an active contributor to the project. In addition to technical responsibilities, he coordinated the construction of a community around the Ubuntu Project as project "community manager" (later ceding the role to Jono Bacon) during the Ubuntu's first year and a half. During this period, he worked full time for Canonical Ltd.. Within the Project, he served on the "Community Council" governance board that oversees all non-technical aspects of the project, until October 2011.

Other work [edit]

Mako Hill at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei, Taiwan. Mako Hill serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In addition to software development, Hill writes extensively. He has been published in academic books and conference proceedings and in magazines, newsletters, and online journals. He is the author of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO, the canonical document on managing FOSS projects, and has published academic work on FOSS from anthropological, sociological, management and software engineering perspectives and has written and spoken about intellectual property, copyright, and collaboration more generally.

Hill has worked for several years as a consultant for FOSS projects specializing in coordinating releases of software as free or open software and structuring development efforts to encourage community involvement. He spends a significant amount of his time traveling and giving talks on FOSS and intellectual property primarily in Europe and North America.

Previous to his current positions, Hill pursued research full time as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory. At the lab, he has worked in both the Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture groups on collaborative writing and decision-making software. One project, Selectricity is an award-winning voting tool which received prizes and grants from MTV and Cisco.

He serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation,^[12] the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Ubuntu Community Council. He is on the board of the Free Software Foundation.

References [edit]

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Benjamin Mako Hill

• Personal website
• Copyrighteous — personal weblog
• http://freedomdefined.org/
• http://revealingerrors.com
• MIT LabCAST: Selectricity

v t e GNU Project History GNU Manifesto Free Software Foundation Europe India Latin America History of free software Licenses GNU General Public License GNU Lesser General Public License Affero General Public License GNU Free Documentation License GPL linking exception Software GNU (variants) Hurd GNOME Bash GCC GNU Emacs glibc Coreutils Build system GNUnet Gnuzilla (IceCat) Gnash more... Public speakers Alexandre Oliva Benjamin Mako Hill Bradley M. Kuhn Eben Moglen Federico Heinz Georg C. F. Greve Loïc Dachary Ricardo Galli Richard Stallman Robert J. Chassell John Sullivan Other topics GNU/Linux naming controversy Revolution OS BadVista Defective by Design