L
Luis Villa
tieguy.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Luis Villa, a lawyer with Mozilla experience, writes about open source licensing, copyright, forking, privacy, and terms of service.
What HN saysCommenters cite his posts on per-file license information, non-licensing risks, and the Diaspora discussion as useful legal perspectives.
15HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
16stories submitted
37story points
13 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture2 people · 6 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 2On the Importance of Per-File License Information2 people · 5 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 3Notes on Friday's Diaspora presentation at Mozilla2 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 4First thoughts on Bilski by Mozilla lawyer Luis Villa1 people · 5 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 5Google is your butler - the tension between utility and privacy1 people · 3 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Forking and Standards: Why The Right to Fork Can Be Pro-Social1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 7Stop with "contamination" about GPL. It's just "hereditary"1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The Linux desktop’s innovation problem1 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 9Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 10Other Ways to Slice Revenue Pies1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Luis Villa on Diaspora (A Distributed Social Network Project)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Luis Villa on Patents (H.264, Theora and MPEG-LA)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 13Luis Villa: SaaS is free software's biggest challenge1 people · 1 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 14The Libre Web Application Stack (A Code Story)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 15Followup thoughts on the Bilski decision, by Mozilla lawyer Luis Villa1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
mgunes · 2010-05-09
Follow-ups:
http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html
http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/05/08/responding-to-joindiaspora/
cschwarm · 2010-01-09
I believe it will continue to grow but not as fast as it needs to be any serious competitor to Windows or MacOS in 2010.
It still lacks a good-enought variety of (proprietary) third-party applications and games.
This is what most of the younger power users care about -- and they are the ones who learn computer usage most easily. But there's no compelling reason for them to try or to switch to Linux.
What blocks the supply of third-party applications is the lack of a default decentral installer on the major Linux distributions. APT just doens't cut it. In a recent review of using a Macbook, former GNOME Quality Control lead, Luis Villa, wrote [1]:
"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great."
I do find new software like that, too, but APT wasn't made for this use case. As a result, I stopped reading reviews of Linux applications. Most of the time, it's a hassle to get the dicussed software installed, for they are often not available in Ubuntu's repositories or it's an old version.
I also stopped buying or reading Linux magazines or journals for this reason.
So, even if there are new great applications out there, the word spreads slowly. As a result, Linux appears…
hugoroy · 2013-06-16
There are other solutions to fix this,
http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuous-text-als…
However, if you think this is really the problem about ToS, I think you're missing the bigger picture: http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree.html
gioele · 2013-04-25
Lawyer perspective on non-licensing (it' dangerous): http://tieguy.org/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-seriously-as…
Non-lawyer perspective: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
martey · 2012-05-02
Furthermore, is it not a better idea to simply include this in the readme and leave it out of the code altogether?
Luis Villa discusses some reasons why you might want include licensing information in every file: http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-licens…
emarcotte · 2010-08-21
They are active:
http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/08/20/notes-on-diaspora-talk/