The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro bono legal services to protect and advance free and open source software (FOSS), today announced the formation of Moglen Ravicher LLC, a law firm which will represent select for-profit clients that support FOSS but are not eligible to receive SFLC's pro bono services.

"Interesting article in LinuxWorld about the future of free software by Eben Moglen... «...If you’ve become dependent on a commons for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don’t strip-mine the forest; you don’t fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea, and you don’t want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected...» ..."

What do you see as the biggest danger to open-source software today? On the one hand, there's still a locus of resistance. Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and indeed necessary model.

"I became a fan of Eben Moglen when I saw this quote from him: “We also live in a world in which the right to tinker is under some very substantial threat. This is said to be because movie and record companies must eat. I will concede that they must eat. Though, like me, they should eat less.” This logic could be applied across the board in society! Computerworld recently featured an interview with Eben Moglen..."

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software.

"...The GNU GPL is not an “open source” license except that the Open Source Initiative organization placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. This is trivial in comparison to writing and maintaining the license.

"I just got a note from Joe Latone of IBM Research that brought the happy news that the video of Eben Moglen’s talk Copyleft Capitalism, GPLv3 and the Future of Software Innovation, given at at IBM Research on October 29, 2007, is now available online: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2408787365037153871 ..."