Glyn Moody

Glyn Moody is a widely-published journalist, renowned author, and Copyright & Digital Rights Expert, writing about the digital world for more than 40 years. He is the author of “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” and “Walled Culture”. Mr Moody is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times among others.

Glyn holds a PhD in Mathematics from University of Cambridge (1981). His book, “Rebel Code: Linux And The Open Source Revolution” (2001) is the first and only detailed history of the rise of open source.

He is a contributor to Ars Technica UK, Techdirt, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Economist, Wired, New Scientist, and numerous computing titles.

His weekly column, “Getting Wired”, was the first regular column about the business use of the internet, and ran 400 total articles between 1994 through 2001. More recently, he has written nearly 2,000 articles for the leading tech policy site Techdirt, over 400 for Ars Technica UK, and 427 columns in the Computer Weekly.

Glyn’s blog, Walled Culture, complemented with the Walled Culture: Behind the © Bricks podcast shares his insights and thoughts on “the evolution of access to knowledge and culture in an increasingly digitised world” and “the new relationships being built between creators and their fans”.

His newest book, Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor, released in September 2022.

Glyn achieved Senior Wrangler grade in 1977 and PhD in Quantum Mechanics in 1982 from The University of Cambridge.

He started his career as a journalist at Reed Business Information where he worked for about a decade as the Editor and Publishing Director. There, he often reviewed the latest computer hardware, including the Hewlett-Packard 150.

As an Author

His first book, Glanglish and Other Weekly Essays, was published in 1990.

Windows And PCs: A Complete Introduction, was published in 1993 by NewTech (GB). This book gave an insight about Windows 3.1 and its working with PCs.

The Internet with Windows: A Practical Companion, published in 1994 by Butterworth-Heinemann, is an all embracing, practical, worldwide introduction and user's guide to the Internet, providing the answers to basic questions, and takes a look at the Internet from the UK/European perspective.

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, published in 2000 by Basic Books, chronicles the race to create and perfect open-source software, and provides the ideal perch from which to explore the changes that cyberculture has engendered in our society.

Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics Is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine, and Business, published in 2004 by Wiley, examines the personalities who have brought bioinformatics to life and explores the commercial applications and investment opportunities of the most lucrative discipline within genomics.

Walled Culture: how big content uses technology and the law to lock down culture and keep creators poor: Walled Culture is the first book providing a compact, non-technical history of digital copyright and its problems over the last 30 years, and the social, economic and technological implications. It explains in detail why copyright has failed, and how we might do better.

Some of the iconic journal publications are:

Linux Journal August 2018: Deep Dive: Containers: title: Open Sauce (Column name): What Does "Ethical" AI Mean for Open Source?
Linux Journal February 2019: The Security Issue, title: Open Sauce (Column name): If Software Is Funded from a Public Source Its Code Should Be Open Source.

He is a contributor to Ars Technica UK, Techdirt, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Economist, Wired, New Scientist, and numerous computing titles.

In his own words that he said in a recent interview with Hilton Supra:
“I want to do something that is a little bit more practical, and has a little bit more impact on the world.” It is this vision that drove him from numbers to the world of words where he wrote some benchmarks as “Rebel Code” and “Walled Culture”. 

Likewise, he mentioned his vision behind understanding more Bioinformatics and open source: "Bioinformatics is an application of the open source methodology to genomics, and the whole Human Genome Project is actually an open source project, because the people behind it very wisely made the decision to share the DNA files freely with no restrictions, and it is that which has driven the amazing genomic revolution that we see today. But, it's exactly the same approach: the open source methodology." 

Looking through the similarities between the internet and open-source solutions, he entered the space of copyrights. Finding the two concepts antagonistic to each other, he said: "It turns out that copyrighting is kind of an anti-thesis of the sharing world. Copyright is based on the idea that if you want to make a copy of something, you have to ask permission for every single copy."