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Luis Villa's Home Page

Ramblings on law school in New York, free software, and the spaces in between.
By Luis Villa

Post Frequency: 1.5/day

Last Entry: February 26, 2020 at 00:21:04

Surviving 2020 on Twitter

Posted on February 26, 2020
I’m a political junkie, perhaps in some ways more now than ever. And yet, I’m posting very little about the 2020 election on Twitter. An old friend with similar political compulsions asked how I’m doing it. The answer is ironically too long for Twitter, so here goes...

Complying with Creative Commons license attribution requirements in slides and powerpoint

Posted on February 27, 2017
When I was at Mozilla and WMF, I frequently got asked how to give proper credit when using Creative Commons-licensed images in slideshows. I got the question again last week, and am working on slides right now, so here’s a quick guide. The basics First, a quick refresher...

React?s license: necessary and open?

Posted on October 31, 2016
I got multiple emails last week about React?s patent license, and this analysis made the rounds. So a few quick thoughts. tl;dr: React?s patent license (1) isn?t a bad idea, because the BSD license is not explicit about granting patent rights; and (2) probably meets the requirements of the Open Source Definition...

Public licenses and data: So what to do instead?

Posted on September 26, 2016
I just explained why open and copyleft licensing, which work fairly well in the software context, might not be legally workable, or practically a good idea, around data. So what to do instead? tl;dr: say no to licenses, say yes to norms. Partial solutions In this complex landscape, it should be no surprise that there…

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Copyleft, attribution, and data: other considerations

Posted on September 21, 2016
Public licenses for databases don’t work well. Before going into solutions to that problem, though, I wanted to talk briefly about some things that are important to consider when thinking about solutions: real-world examples of the problems; a common, but bad, solution; and a discussion of the motivations behind public licenses...

Copyleft and data: databases as poor subject

Posted on September 14, 2016
tl;dr: Open licensing works when you strike a healthy balance between obligations and reuse. Data, and how it is used, is different from software in ways that change that balance, making reasonable compromises in software (like attribution) suddenly become insanely difficult barriers...

Copyleft and data: database law as (poor) platform

Posted on September 12, 2016
tl;dr: Databases are a very poor fit for any licensing scheme, like copyleft, that (1) is intended to encourage use by the entire world but also (2) wants to place requirements on that use. This is because of broken legal systems and the way data is used...

Free as in ? ? My LibrePlanet 2016 talk

Posted on March 23, 2016
Below is the talk I gave at LibrePlanet 2016. The tl;dr version: Learning how political philosophy has evolved since the 1670s shows that the FSF’s four freedoms are good, but not sufficient. In particular, the “capability approach” pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum is applicable to software, and shows us how to think about…

The All Writs Act on Wikipedia v. legal academic reach

Posted on February 18, 2016
Legal friends! The world needs you. Here’s the graph of readership of All Writs Act on Wikipedia: That’s 45,035 reads yesterday (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate – not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th…

Reinventing FOSS user experiences: a bibliography

Posted on February 10, 2016
There is a small genre of posts around re-inventing the interfaces of popular open source software; I thought I’d collect some of them for future reference: Recent: Drupal WordPress: ma.tt, wp.com Older: Firefox: 0.1 release notes Visual Editor: first blog post I can find (though I’m sure there are many emails), Economist The first two…

Brilliant.

Posted on April 01, 2011
Saw this for the first time on my drive to work yesterday: Congrats to all my friends on a very solid release and on reinvigorating their important message of public service.

MPL Beta 2- as FAQ

Posted on March 31, 2011
I’m still working, albeit sometimes slowly, on the new MPL. Two days ago we announced the release of Beta 2- you should go read it :) Besides the usual (small tweaks to some language in a further attempt to get it Just Right; improvements to the GPL language; etc...

Joining W3C PSIG as an Invited Expert

Posted on March 25, 2011
Just a note to say that I’ve been invited to join the W3C‘s Patents and Standards Interest Group as an Invited Expert. I’m pretty pleased by this and am looking forward to contributing immediately. Invited Experts speak for themselves, not other organizations, so I will not be representing Mozilla or anyone else, but hopefully I’ll [...

Other Ways to Slice Revenue Pies

Posted on February 28, 2011
A large company with a distribution network, and a little guy with something nifty to distribute walk into a bar… Step 18 / Rex Roof / CC BY 2.0 [NB: Nothing here is legal advice; just business advice. I do not represent either the GNOME Foundation or Canonical, and have not talked to either one [...

Changing Jobs

Posted on January 07, 2011
Today was my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I’m leaving to work at the law firm of Greenberg, Traurig. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but I’m pretty sure that it is the right one, both for me and for Mozilla...

offline no-keyboard rss reader?

Posted on December 08, 2010
So… I’m in the market for a way to read RSS feeds offline, with no keyboard; i.e., some sort of tablet or kindle-like device. Ideally it should be cheap and reliable (reliable in the sense that I can pick it up every morning while still groggy, take it to a concrete bunker with no wifi, [...

do ?open UIs suck?? or do ?UIs without vision suck??

Posted on November 16, 2010
Tim Lee is quite close to something very smart here, I think, and related to something I’ve been pondering for a while: why are so many open source software UIs typically bad? Tim’s primary answer, I think, not wrong: good design generally results from having a strong vision of what good design for a particular [...

Wikipedia hiring for Bugmaster! (only 24 hours left!)

Posted on October 21, 2010
Because I know a fair number of QA-oriented people (for some reason) still read this blog, I thought it might be worth pointing out that you still have 24 hours to apply for the bugmaster position at Wikipedia. Sounds like a cool gig for the right person, in a growing organization.

reading recommendation on American political multilingualism?

Posted on September 07, 2010
I’m trying to find a book on the political history of multilingualism in the US; in other words, of why/when it started becoming acceptable (and in some cases required) for government works, electoral ballots, etc., to be written and printed in multiple languages...

Why I love (and hate) Panorama

Posted on August 25, 2010
I’ve been trying to get back to living my life in a task-centric manner, and Firefox Panorama, without necessarily being designed for those goals, is perfect for it. Someone else put the words in my mouth: when you’re trying to do task-centric computing, what you need is not just a place to dump tasks (a [...

publicly thanking dwdiff

Posted on August 25, 2010
High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well. So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff...

Notes on Diaspora Talk

Posted on August 20, 2010
Diaspora came to lunch at Mozilla today. Some notes. They gave me a nice shoutout. ;) They’re doing pair-programming and test-driven development this summer, which I think is great. Sounds like they’re getting some great guidance from Pivotal Labs...

A must-read on google

Posted on August 12, 2010
In the same vein as my earlier commentaries on Google comes this piece by James Grimmelman. He doesn’t comment on the actual substance of the net neutrality announcement. Instead he focuses on process, and his description of how google does things seem so dead on to me into how google that I think I’ll be [...

The Libre Web Application Stack (A Code Story)

Posted on August 09, 2010
[This was originally published at autonomo.us- comments over there.] [Disclaimer: since my last post at autonomo.us, I have become an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I don't feel this has tainted my views, but feel free to weigh that information as part of your analysis of this article...

Notes on Eugene Bestor?s ?Backwoods Utopias?

Posted on August 06, 2010
A few months ago I finished reading Eugene Bestor‘s ‘Backwoods Utopias‘, a book on the Utopian social-communitarian movements of the pre-Civil War US. Some belated notes on the book’s themes follow. The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember [...

A Pre-GUADEC Request

Posted on July 18, 2010
I’m preparing for my GUADEC keynote and have a request for material that would be useful. Specifically, does anyone have a good group picture from the first GUADEC? This is the best I’ve found so far, but I seem to recall there were better...

100 Words for my Friends Taking the Bar Exam

Posted on July 15, 2010
Things I did to myself before the bar exam: Did only a fraction of the recommended practice essays. Generally felt drastically underprepared. Things that happened to me during the bar exam: Day before the exam, while studying poolside at the hotel: got a sunburn...

Some Followup Thoughts on Bilski

Posted on June 30, 2010
Some Third-Party Thoughts A friend summarized Bilski this way: Shorter #Bilski: Federal Circuit, your rule was too straightforward and didn’t add enough uncertainty to an already volatile field. I don’t think that was actually the court’s intent, but certainly that will be the short-term outcome...

First thoughts on Bilski

Posted on June 28, 2010
Some very preliminary thoughts on Bilski, written in the course of one train-ride to work. This does not represent the viewpoint of my employer and should not be taken as legal advice; merely observations on one ruling. In the lower court (Federal Circuit) ruling on this case, the Federal Circuit was very aggressive in trying [...

working it

Posted on June 09, 2010
It is extremely satisfying when you can see your work turn directly into a working product. I just played with last night’s test version of firefox, and as per roc’s blog post, it indeed contains the video support whose licensing I (and others here) were working on last week...

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