The Faces of Open Source: Luis Villa

This is the second episode from the series, “The Faces of Open Source Law,” by Shane Martin Coughlan. The series puts a face to the vibrant open source community, and the fascinating discussions happening within it, through a series of interviews that we’ll be sharing here. This first “season” focuses on issues related to law (copyright, licensing, patents, foundations, governance, etc.) and includes interviews with several current and former OSI Board Directors.

In addition, Shane has graciously offered his own insights from the interviews, which we’ve included below.

Enjoy…


Luis Villa – The Faces of Open Source Law – Season 1 – Episode 2

There are a ton of people who have contributed to pushing forward knowledge around open source and more generally open culture. One of the names that keeps cropping up is Luis Villa, a gentleman that some recognize from OSI, some from Wikimedia, and some from his contributions to inter-community legal and social discourse. I sat down with Luis in the second episode of “The Faces of Open Source Law” to touch on the breadth of how the concepts of “use, study, share and improve” have touched on so many aspects of innovation in modern life.

One of Luis’s strengths is his ability to articulate immensely complex ideas in a simple, approachable manner. Another is to be cognizant of how so many moving parts of open source, open data and open culture are evolving. We opened “The Faces of Open Source Law” with a slightly technical figure in Armijn Hemel. With Luis we pulled back further towards the politics and law, and set the scene for digging into more legal or corporate areas as the series progressed.

I have to give kudos to Luis for providing one of our best interviews without any rehearsal. We simply sat down, started talking, and flowed into some of the big issues. Each episode is only a few minutes long, inherently limiting what we can cover, but we always ended with a “what should people watch out for in the next 12 to 24 months?” Luis set a great tone with his answer.

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“Luis Villa – The Faces of Open Source Law – Season 1 – Episode 2” is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license.