Freenet is based on Ian's paper "A Distributed Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System". Ian started the Freenet Project around July of 1999, and continues to coordinate the project. Learn more about Ian on his personal website.

Matthew has been working on Freenet since before the 0.5 release. His work and that of others has resulted in dramatic improvements to the performance and stability of the network.

Oskar was also one of the earliest contributors to the Freenet project, and has made some important theoretical breakthroughs that lead to the beginning of Freenet 0.7, see the papers page.

Since 2003, Florent has improved various aspects of the software and performed the project's system administration. In his day job, he is the Technical Director of Matta Consulting, a boutique security consultancy firm.

Michael has mostly contributed detailed simulations as part of the Google Summer of Code. He has been helpful in designing the New Transport Layer.

The current release manager. He joined in GSoC 2013 and has been a driving force behind tackling long standing issues in Freenet.

The Developer of the Web of Trust and Freetalk. He worked on the Web of Trust in part-time for one year and is now working as volunteer again.

A Debian developer who currently works on packaging Freenet.

Works on the Freenet core and wherever there is need.

A long term contributor who, among other things, helps keep the contact between the core developers and users in active subgroups.

A Gentoo packager who untangled all the dependencies of Freenet and packaged it cleanly in Gentoo.

The current maintainer of pyFreenet and infocalypse. He also writes articles and tutorials for Freenet

A dilligent team of people from various backgrounds who make it possible to ship Freenet and this website in many different languages.

This list is missing many freesite authors, plugin writers, and a host of other people who contributed in various ways.

Works on Freenet core and communicates via FMS.

The developer of the Freenet-based Forum system FMS, of FreenetHG and of FLIP, chat over Freenet.

A group of users and programmers who use an old spammable Freenet-based forum system which has been abandoned by most of the core developers. They are active, however, and though it takes time for their contributions to reach to core development, they take part in Freenet development.

A dutch developer and statistic-enthusiast. He now works at Topicus.Education.

Scott is responsible for the implementation of much of the cryptography elements within Freenet.

Steven helps with administration of Freenet Project Inc, and is an advisor to the project on business and publicity matters.

Dave's main contribution has been Freemail, his Summer of Code project to build a working email-over-Freenet system, as well as some debugging and core work in various places.

Robert has helped improve the speed and security of Freenet by finding two major bugs, and has recently contributed some code.

David (Zothar) has helped the Freenet project as time permits and interest directs, including configuration, statistics and peer management via FCP, the FProxy stats page and Node 2 Node Messages (N2NM/N2NTMs).

And hundreds of others, who either haven't asked to be added here, who prefer to remain nameless, or who we just haven't got around to thanking. Not to mention thousands of users, testers, and donors!