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.

References

External links

Interview with ''Red Hat'' magazine

Villa'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 {{US-compu-bio-stub

See also

References

External links