Episode 17: Discussions about Gnome, Linux and Software Development with Luis Villa - Part 2

Deep Fried Bytes

Keith and Woody wrap up their talk with Linux developer, open source advocate and law student Luis Villa who was an early developer of Gnome to discuss Gnome, the Open Source community and even about intellectual property and the law.

Thanks to our guest this episode

Luis is a law student at Columbia Law School. His studies focus on the overlap of law and technology, including intellectual property, telecommunications, privacy, and e-commerce, and outside of class he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law School Science and Technology Law Review. Before school, he spent a year at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center as 'geek in residence', working on a variety of projects, including StopBadware.org and the h2o educational web software project. Prior to that, he was at Ximian and Novell, managing and working on Linux-based desktop projects with global teams, including the Evolution PIM, the GNOME 2.0 release (in collaboration with Sun), and the Ximian and Novell Linux Desktops. Outside of law school, Luis remains involved in software, serving on the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors. Luis's undergraduate education was at Duke University, where he majored in political science and computer science. While at Duke, Luis attended over one hundred basketball games while wearing a devil mask, and co-authored Extreme Mindstorms: An Advanced Guide To Lego Mindstorms. Undergrad is Computer Science. Got started in computers in '85. Started off as double major in Political Science in Mechanical Engineering. Was a programming class as part of engineering, and thought it was more fun. A guy down the hallway installed Linux on his machine, and started finding out about Linux stuff. This was during the heated MSFT case and talk about Microsoft as a monopolist. He was interested in the alternative. One night he was writing a one page paper, word crashed eight or ten times. Luis’ blog is http://tieguy.org/blog/

Show Notes

• Gnome Foundation
• Open Source Licenses mentioned in show:
  • General Public License 3.0
  • BSD
  • Microsoft Public License (ms-Pl)
  • Apache
  • Affero General Public License
  • Apple Public Source License
• Apple’s use of UNIX
• Open Source at Microsoft
• Miguel de Icaza
• Nat Friedman
• Keith’s story about buying iTunes music legally

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