He is the founder and director of iMatix Corporation, started in 1996 to promote the development of open source software engineering technologies.

From 2005-2007 he was the president of the the FFII, a European civil society association that works for a free information infrastructure. The FFII was instrumental in stopping the advance of software patents in Europe and has been a partner to industry and politicians in key areas of innovation policy.

Peter has been active in the debate against software patents, explaining to the European Patent Office and the European Parliament why software and business process patents are so deadly for small innovative firms that are the life-blood of Europe's innovation.

As a passionate and highly-skilled programmer, he is the inventor/designer of many software engineering tools, code generators, web servers, and protocol libraries which have been used as the basis for large-scale projects. Many of these tools are distributed from the iMatix web site as free software.

In 2006 he launched the controversial CAPSoff campaign, as a demonstration of the power of the internet for campaigning, and for the FFII he launched the European Patent Conference and other campaigns.