Bassel Khartabil

Bassel Khartabil (Arabic: باسل خرطبيل; 22 May 1981 – 3 October 2015), also known as Bassel Safadi (باسل صفدي), was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015. Human rights organizations say that he was detained for his activities in support of freedom of expression, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered his detention to have been arbitrary. Khartabil was born in Damascus to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, and was raised in Syria, where he specialized in open source software development. He was chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab and was CTO of Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria. He served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, and Openclipart. He is credited with "opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people." His last work included an open, 3D virtual reconstruction of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, with real time visualization using the web programming framework Aiki Framework. This was later created and displayed in his honor. In 2018, the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship was announced in Khartabil's memory. The fellowship awards $50,000 and additional support to individuals developing open culture in their communities. The fellowship was created by Creative Commons, Fabricatorz Foundation, Jimmy Wales Foundation, Mozilla, #NEWPALMYRA, and Wikimedia.