Hi everyone,
I’m simply thrilled to welcome Luis Villa to the Foundation as our new Deputy General Counsel.
Thanks to Kat Walsh, I met Luis during my first months at the Foundation. Kat loves Luis, and it is no wonder why. In addition to being a superb lawyer, Luis is an open source developer, has worked with leaders in our Internet legal circles, and has a great personality that embraces our culture.
His most recent adventure took place at the Palo Alto office of Greenberg Traurig, one of the top global law firms. There he worked with well-known Internet lawyers like Ian Ballon and Heather Meeker. Luis focused on technology transactions, helping clients create solutions to licensing problems, with a particular emphasis on open source and software standards. His clients included Mozilla, the Open Compute Project, and a variety of clients large and small. Luis successfully defended Google in the Oracle-Google/Android lawsuit, primarily working on the question of API copyrightability. I hired Luis as outside counsel to work on a tough legal matter for us, and his answers were on point, clear, and practical.
Luis’ first contact with free software came was when he was in college at Duke University. There he studied political science and computer science, began using Linux, and helped triage Mozilla's bugzilla. A professor paid him to play with Lego, resulting in brief maintainership of the GPL’d LegOS operating system and co-authorship of the book "Extreme Mindstorms".
After graduation, Luis worked at Ximian, a Linux desktop startup, doing quality assurance and eventually managing the desktop team. As part of that, he got heavily involved in the GNOME desktop project, becoming bugmaster and then getting elected to the board of directors. After Ximian was acquired, Luis became "geek in residence" at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. At Berkman, he translated from lawyer to geek, and managed, maintained, and developed several software projects.
After Berkman, Luis started his legal ventures in life at Columbia Law School, where he was Editor in Chief of the Science and Technology Law Review, was awarded honors each year, and was co-recipient of the class prize for excellence in intellectual property scholarship. His thesis dealt with the use of software standards as part of antitrust enforcement. Outside of class, he participated in the GPL revision process, worked in the General Counsel's office at Red Hat, and developed a surprisingly strong attachment to New York City.
After law school, Luis worked in the legal department at Mozilla, where his major project was revising the Mozilla Public License. The license got over a thousand words shorter, and gained stronger patent protections and compatibility with the Apache and GPL licenses. Luis also worked on privacy, contracts, standards bodies, and other issues.
Outside of work, Luis is an invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium's Patents and Standards Interest Group, and a board member and chair of the Licensing Committee at the Open Source Initiative. He also enjoys biking, photography, history, Duke basketball (men's and women's), and eating.
Luis's first Wikipedia edit under his current user name dates to Feb. 2007. Like any good pedant, he has also been making minor spelling and grammar corrections anonymously for many years.
So, as you can tell, we are extremely excited about having Luis on our team and wish him a warm welcome.
Cheers,
Geoff