Pablo Soto Bravo (born 1979) is a Spanish software developer. He was
municipal councillor of Madrid from 2015 to 2019.
In 2001 he developed the .MANOLITO protocol, Blubster and Piolet - two
peer-to-peer file-sharing servants. In May 2006, Soto released Manolito, a third clone application, and new versions of Blubster and Piolet.
He apparently left the MP2P Community in 2004; subsequently Blubster and Piolet slowly began to lose their user base. By the end of 2004, when discussions on P2Pforums.com were focused on whether or not he had left the community for financial reasons, it was known that he has a rare form of
muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophies (MD) are a genetically and clinically heterogeneous group of rare neuromuscular diseases that cause progressive weakness and breakdown of skeletal muscles over time. The disorders differ as to which muscles are primarily affe ...
, that has forced him to move in
wheelchair.
Soto later put his energy into , an open source peer-to-peer software for storage space sharing (
distributed computing).
In June 2008, Warner Music, Universal Music, Emi, Sony and the Spanish association
PROMUSICAE filed a lawsuit against his company MP2P Technologies, demanding 13 million euros for ''
unfair competition''. He was acquitted on the charges of copyright violation in December 2011.
After the
2015 local elections Soto became a member of the City Council of Madrid with
Ahora Madrid
Ahora Madrid ( en, Madrid Now) was a citizen platform of popular unity, formed as an ''instrumental party without organic internal life'', in order to stand for the municipal elections of 2015 in the city of Madrid.
For this project, ''Ganem ...
. He announced plans to promote usage of
free software for the municipal software platforms, and is head of open government for the city. He has launched ''Decide Madrid'', an online platform whereby citizens can propose policy for the city: a proposal supported by a number of users equal to 1 percent of the adult population is put before voters in a referendum.
[James Badcock]
"The digital activist taking politicians out of Madrid politics"
BBC News, 9 January 2019. He renounced to his office as city councillor on 8 October 2019.
References
External links
Pablo Soto Homepage*https://web.archive.org/web/20071022051035/http://www.blubster.com/
*https://web.archive.org/web/20001109023200/http://www.piolet.com/
*https://web.archive.org/web/20071023182130/http://www.manolito.com/
*https://web.archive.org/web/20071123182256/http://www.omemo.com/
*https://web.archive.org/web/20100401204330/http://www.foofind.com/
1979 births
Living people
Spanish computer scientists
People with muscular dystrophy
Madrid city councillors (2015–2019)
Madrid city councillors (2019–2023)
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