Bassel Khartabil

Bassel Khartabil , also known as Bassel Safadi , is a Palestinian Syrian opensource software developer. From March 15, 2012, the oneyear anniversary of the Syrian uprising, he was detained by the Syrian government at Adra Prison in Damascus. As of October 3, 2015, he had been transferred to an unknown location, probably to be judged by a military court. On October 7, 2015, Human Rights Watch andother human rights organizations issued a letter demanding that Khartabils whereabouts be disclosed. On November 11, 2015, rumors surfaced that Khartabil had been secretly sentenced to death.

Khartabil was born in Damascus and raised in Syria, where he specializes in open source software development. He has been chief technology officer and cofounder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab and was CTO of AlAous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria. He has served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and has contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Openclipart, Fabricatorz, and Sharism. He is credited with opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people.

Source: Wikipedia