Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who worked as Deputy General Counsel and then as Senior Director of Community Engagement at the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...
. Previously he was an attorney at
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...
, where he worked on the revision of the
Mozilla Public License
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...
(MPL). He continued that work in his next job at
Greenberg Traurig
Greenberg Traurig is a multinational law firm founded in Miami in 1967. As of 2022, the Greenberg Traurig is the 9th largest law firm in the United States.
The firm has 43 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and ...
where he was part of the team defending Google against
Oracle's claims concerning Android. Prior to graduating from
Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School (Columbia Law or CLS) is the law school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university in New York City. Columbia Law is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools in the world and has always ranked i ...
in 2009, he was an employee at
Ximian
Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Migu ...
,
which was acquired by
Novell
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.
Under the lead ...
in 2003. He spent a year as a "senior geek in residence" at Harvard's
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...
working on
StopBadware.org
StopBadware was an anti-malware nonprofit organization focused on making the Web safer through the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of badware websites. It is the successor to StopBadware.org, a project started in 2006 at the Berkman Cente ...
. He has been elected four times to the board of the
GNOME Foundation
GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME project.
Purpose
The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platfo ...
. He was editor-in-chief of the ''Columbia Science and Technology Law Review'', and blogs regularly.
He was a director of the
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...
from April 2012 to March 2015.
In 2017 he co-founded Tidelift, which seeks to improve the ecosystem around open source software by providing support for professional teams using open source and helping maintainers build sustainable businesses around their projects.
See also
*
List of Wikipedia people
The list of Wikipedia people includes notable editors, founders and functionaries of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
__NOTOC__
By surname
A
* Evan Amos, a New York City-based professional photographer known for his numerous stock image ...
References
External links
Interview with ''Red Hat'' magazineVilla's Blog
American bloggers
American computer programmers
American lawyers
GNOME developers
Columbia Law School alumni
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Members of the Open Source Initiative board of directors
Wikimedia Foundation staff members
Berkman Fellows
American Wikimedians
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