Portrait: Luis Villa, from Bugzilla to bar association
In 10 years, Luis Villa has seen his career expand side by side with free and open source software (FOSS). Starting as bugmaster at Ximian, one of the companies that shaped GNOME as we know it today, he has been a mid-level manager at Novell, the coordinator of testing with the GNOME project, and a frequent member of the GNOME Foundation Board. More recently, Villa has been a student at Harvard Law School. When he graduates, he hopes to use his knowledge of how FOSS and business interact to benefit both.
In many ways, the outline of Villa's career has been obvious from his college days, when he took a double major in political science and computing. At the time, he had no idea that the two might be connected. "They were just two things I was interested in. I had no idea that the two would overlap."
He first saw GNU/Linux briefly during his freshman year in 1996, when a friend installed it for a week. "Next year, I got really fed up with Windows, and my neighbor helped me install Red Hat 5.0, and I've been using ever since."
Before long, Villa saw the community as a place where his two interests could unite. "I was very curious about the non-technical aspects from day one," he says. "It was obvious to me that the core notion that a bunch of people could get together on the Internet and produce something was really revolutionary. It was just obvious that there was something important that was going on socially and politically."
Villa began doing quality assurance work for Mozilla.
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