Bassel Khartabil

Bassel Khartabil (22 May 1981 – 3 October 2015; ), also known as Bassel Safadi (), 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 claim 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 and 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 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."

His last work included an open, 3D virtual reconstruction of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, real time visualization, and development with Fabricatorz for 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. Provided by Wikipedia