Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who is Co-Founder and General Counsel for Tidelift. Previously he worked as Deputy General Counsel and then as Senior Director of Community Engagement at the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

, and prior to that he was an attorney at

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

, 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 is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

(MPL). He continued that work in his next job at

Greenberg Traurig Greenberg Traurig is a multinational law firm, law and lobbying firm founded in Miami in 1967 by Mel Greenberg, Larry J. Hoffman, and Robert H. Traurig. As of 2025, it is the eighth-largest law firm in the United States. The firm has 49 locati ...

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 (CLS) is the Law school in the United States, law school of Columbia University, a Private university, private Ivy League university in New York City. The school was founded in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School. The un ...

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 Miguel ...

, 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 NetWare. Novell technolog ...

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. He has been elected four times to the board of the GNOME Foundation. 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 a California public benefit corporation "actively involved in Open Source community-building, education, and public advocacy to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software". Governance The ...

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 Place of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-stub

See also

References

External links