Candidacy Announcement: Luis Villa

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

This announcement is available with better formatting at
http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/10/31/running-for-the-gnome-foundation-board/

I'll be running again for the Board this year. This will be an unusual
candidacy. I will not be running to do various and sundry board tasks;
I'll be running to do exactly one thing:

    * legal work- a vote for me is a vote that says 'Luis should be
the coordinator of all GNOME-related legal issues.'

I also will volunteer for two other things, but if someone else wants
to do them it won't bother me:

    * secretarial services- I hate doing secretarial meeting bits, but
this is often something organizations delegate to their lawyers, so
I'd better get good at it.
    * occasional common sense- I stress occasional here because I
don't have the time or the energy to get into petty politics with
anyone, so if that happens, I'll pretty quickly retreat to
lawyer-secretary.

I will not do:

    * anything non-legal that goes beyond common-sense advice giving.

Don't vote for me if:

    * you think someone else should be the central coordinator for the
board's legal issues
    * you think board members should be jacks of all trades
    * you think it is crazy to hand legal issues over to a second-year
law student (nb: you have to justify who should be doing it in that
case :)

Do vote for me if:

    * You think issues like copyright, trademark, patents, legal
status of web services, relationships with outside counsel and
partners, etc., are important to GNOME's future, and you'd like to see
the board (led by me) be proactive in dealing with them.
    * you want someone on the board who is firmly committed to
delegation and coordination.

I will almost certainly serve one term and only one term. I expect to
have less time once I graduate from school, and the 18 month term will
almost perfectly coincide with the rest of my time in law school. In
addition, if I'm successful in reaching my goals, by the end of the
term I'll have built strong relationships with our outside counsel,
and it will be less necessary to have a board member aggressively
devoted to legal issues.

Affiliations
=======

I am currently a student at Columbia Law School, and have no other
formal affiliations at this time.

For 12 weeks of this term I will be affiliated with a law firm which
may do work for some of the parties- for example, one firm I am
considering going to this summer does significant work for Sun, and
another has done work representing parties negotiating with Red Hat.
It seems unlikely that any substantial conflict will arise from that,
but if so, I'll notify the rest of the board and recuse myself unless
the board says otherwise.

In the past I have been affiliated with Novell and Red Hat, and done
contract work (through Ximian) for Sun. I maintain relationships with
friends at all of those companies.