I’m a lawyer, executive, and (former) software developer, specializing in open source licensing, product counseling, technology transactions, and community strategy.
What am I up to?
I’m currently a VP at SonarSource, where we are working to build a future of software development that is both faster and more secure.
Current and past volunteering
I volunteer in a variety of capacities, including:
- On the boards of:
- Creative Commons (current)
- the Open ET water data project (current)
- the California Housing Defense Fund (current)
- the Open Source Initiative (past)
- the GNOME project (past)
- As a legal expert for:
- the Patents and Standards Interest Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (past)
- the Legal Working Group of Open Street Map (past)
- As bugmaster for the GNOME project! (past)
- As a Wikipedia editor! (occasionally still current)
Past work
Before Tidelift, I worked on some of the most high-profile technology projects in the world, including:
- I was co-founder and General Counsel of Tidelift, where we created a new way to support open source maintainers and were acquired by SonarSource.
- At the Wikimedia Foundation, I served as Deputy General Counsel and then led the Community Engagement Department.
- At Mozilla, I led the revision of the Mozilla Public License.
- At Greenberg Traurig, my clients included many startups, Facebook, Amazon, and Google in the Google-Oracle lawsuit.
- At Ximian, I helped build and QA Evolution 1.0 and GNOME 2.0.
Other places you can find me
- OpenML.fyi, my newsletter about the intersection of machine learning and open
- @luis_in_brief@social.coop on Mastodon
- @lu.is on Bluesky