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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: 1.1/day

Last Entry: May 20, 2013 at 10:00:49

At the Wikimedia Foundation (for, um, three months now)

Posted on May 20, 2013
Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world?s information infrastructure. It?s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question...

Information diet weekend

Posted on May 06, 2013
As a slight sequel to my “feed reading is an open web problem” post, so far this weekend I have taken the following information diet steps: RSS feeds: 610?339 (and counting). Based on Google’s stats, I’d probably read about a million feed items in Reader...

Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it

Posted on April 22, 2013
I’ve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the lame, useless live bookmarks.) The impending demise of Reader has finally forced me to spit out my thoughts on the issue...

One year on OSI?s board (aka one year in OSI?s licensing)

Posted on March 17, 2013
Since it has been roughly one year since Mozilla nominated me to sit on the OSI board, I thought I’d recap what I’ve done over the course of the year. It hasn’t been a perfect year by any stretch, but I’m pretty happy with what we’ve done and I think we’re pointed in the right…

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Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture

Posted on January 27, 2013
tl;dr: the open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can’t (or even shouldn’t) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses. What if “post open source” is an implicit critique of that assumption – saying, in essence, “I reject the permission culture”? If so, license authors might want to consider creating options that enable people…

So, iPhone friends: Anyone using Simple? Like it??

Posted on January 15, 2013
So, iPhone friends: Anyone using Simple? Like it? Useful? Worth signing up for (now that they have Android)?

Important, excellent long read from @matthewstolle?

Posted on January 14, 2013
Important, excellent long read from @matthewstoller on @aaronsw ‘s broader approach to politics. Read the whole thing. nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-?

Apologies for any spamming

Posted on January 13, 2013
Apologies to any planets/feeds I’m spamming with old tweet-junk right now; I’m trying to archive some tweets into WP and that may lead to some noise temporarily!

Great article by @pchestek on ?belt and suspenders?

Posted on January 10, 2013
Great article by @pchestek on “belt and suspenders” assignment of IP: http://www.propertyintangible.com/2013/01/its-not-really-work-made-for-hire.html

A revised OSI ?Open Source Licenses? page

Posted on January 03, 2013
When someone new to open source does a web search for “open source licenses”, the first page that comes up1 is opensource.org/licenses – making it one of the most important resources for newcomers to open source.2 Despite that, until today, all that a newbie would get when going to that page was two links: one…

Licensing confusion is great! (for lawyers)

Posted on December 03, 2012
I want to heartily unendorse Simon Phipps’ Infoworld article about Github and licensing. Simon’s article makes it sound like no one benefits from sloppy licensing practices, and that is simply not true. Specifically, lawyers benefit! I regularly get calls from clients saying “I have no idea if I’m allowed to use <project X>, because it…

Showrunner and Show Bible? Or Cult?

Posted on November 14, 2012
I don’t currently do much heavily collaborative writing, but I’m still very interested in the process of creating very collaborative works. So one of the many stimulating discussions at Monktoberfest was a presentation by two awesome O’Reilly staffers about the future (and past) of authorship...

Thanking Contributors by Printing the MPL

Posted on November 13, 2012
As part of a general drive to get rid of stuff, I’ve recently become increasingly willing to part with my old books. This has been a painful process – books have many happy memories for me – but I think also a good and focusing one. As part of my emotional reaction to this, I’ve [...

AGPL is usually about free riding, not fragmentation or adoption

Posted on October 09, 2012
When I was at Monktoberfest, our esteemed host reminded me that I’d disagreed with his article “AGPL: Solution In Search of a Problem”, and nudged me to elaborate on the point. Here goes nothing. TL;DR: for most developers, AGPL is really about preventing free riding, not fragmentation – so as long as there is concern [...

Format(ting?) of Forever

Posted on September 10, 2012
Mark Pilgrim had a great post1 a little while ago where he talked about Docbook as ‘The Format of Forever’, but HTML as the ‘Format of Now.’ He also argued that (since technical books were constantly outdated) generating technical books in the Format of Now instead of the Format of Forever made a lot of [...

Speaking at Practicing Law Institute?s Open Source/Free Software 2013

Posted on September 04, 2012
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Practicing Law Institute’s “Open Source and Free Software 2013: Benefits, Risks and Challenges” continuing education for lawyers in San Francisco in December. I did this last year (on a panel with the excellent Mark Radcliffe) and it was a lot of fun...

List of Open _______

Posted on August 29, 2012
Because I think it might be alternately amusing and useful, I’ve decided to compile a list of Open things. Additions welcome in comments; or if you can point me to someone else who has already done this, I’d appreciate that too. I think the list is more interesting if it stays focused on organizations claiming [...

A Quick Note on Conspicuous Text, also known as ALL CAPS

Posted on August 19, 2012
Anil Dash asked about ALL CAPS Friday, and then someone in my (very fun) letterpress class at the San Francisco Center for the Book asked me a related question. So here is a quick post on the lovely subject of ALL CAPS. The basic question: Why do lawyers use so much ALL CAPS and what [...

Open Source Initiative Board Meeting in Chicago

Posted on May 19, 2012
I’m celebrating the end of my portion of my trial by … spending all weekend in meetings, specifically the OSI’s annual face-to-face board meeting, which we’re holding this year in Chicago. It’s been a very productive meeting so far, with lots of good discussion about both our vision and our plan for attacking the future...

Joining the Open Source Initiative board of directors

Posted on March 19, 2012
In the past, I’ve been known to say that skeptical things about the Open Source Initiative’s role in the open source world – usually arguing that OSI was doing the basics (license approval, open source definition) respectably, but also had a lot of potential that wasn’t being taken advantage of...

On the Importance of Per-File License Information

Posted on March 17, 2012
After the release of MPL 2, the first request for MPL 2.1 came from someone who didn’t want to put copyright headers in individual files. The issue has recently reared its head in Apache as well, and I recently was asked related questions by a GPL user as well...

The license term smorgasbord: copyleft, share-alike, reciprocal, viral, or hereditary?

Posted on February 02, 2012
I microblogged (diaspora, identica, twitter) the following statement a few weeks ago: First new year’s resolution, 10 days late: I will use ‘hereditary license’ any time I am tempted to say ‘viral license.’ Surprisingly, this generated quite a few responses (on identica and elsewhere)- some people liked it, but many people had their own alternative [...

Nominated for OpenSource.com People?s Choice Award

Posted on January 24, 2012
Based on my series of MPL posts for opensource.com, I’ve been nominated for a “people’s choice award” as a top contributor to opensource.com. It’s a nice little honor. That said, there are lots of folks on the list of nominees who have written and thought far more than I have this year- so you should [...

Personal MPL acknowledgments

Posted on January 03, 2012
This morning I hit publish on the announcement of MPL 2.0, finishing a two year process. The official announcement had a number of acknowledgements for the many people who helped out along the way, but I wanted to take to my personal blog to add a few personal notes...

A note on 2011

Posted on December 29, 2011
The best thing I did for myself in 2011 was to get back on a bicycle after not being on one for 15+ years, and after never actually being comfortable on one. I’m not going to be racing any time soon, but I now really look forward to a bike ride as part of the [...

San Francisco Recommended Reading

Posted on September 18, 2011
When I moved into San Francisco, I asked some folks about books I should read to get a sense of the history of the city. Here’s a sampling of the books that I’ve read since then, gathered in one place for the next time someone asks me the question...

Making HTML Legal Documents (Like MPL) Look Good

Posted on August 22, 2011
A few months ago I bought “Typography for Lawyers” (TFL), an excellent book that I would recommend to all lawyers. And since the biggest document I was working on at the timeis, of course, published in HTML, I started spending a few minutes here and there on learning enough CSS to make the license look [...

Donated to the Ada Initiative

Posted on June 22, 2011
I’m excited to say that (with Krissa’s support and approval) I donated today to the Ada Initiative’s Seed 100 Campaign. Free and open software and culture have been very good to me, and I’m glad that the Mary and Val (and hopefully soon a fleet of others) will be working to make it more accessible [...

Regular internet detox tips?

Posted on May 13, 2011
Over the past few years I’ve heard a few friends talk about plans to get off the internet for one day a weekend, one weekend a month, etc. Each of the past two years I’ve tried to take 3-4 days off the internet, and both times it has been rejuvenating- I come back feeling pretty [...

looking for a programming analogy- if there is one

Posted on April 17, 2011
As I’ve mentioned before, there are a lot of analogies between programming and legal work. I’m working on an upcoming post to explain a specific application of a legal concept. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those few concepts where there is not a ready programming analogy...