Licensing and Compliance Team

Joshua Gay and Donald Robertson, III are the FSF's licensing and compliance team. They coordinate all compliance lab efforts and are the primary contact in negotiations with violators. In addition, they also handle all assignments and employment disclaimers for various pieces of GNU software; this is a crucial role — without it, it would be very difficult to enforce our licenses.

Licensing Volunteers

A number of volunteers help out by answering licensing questions from the public. In no particular order, they are:

Yoni Rabkin

Yoni Rabkin is a parent, programmer and paralegal who studied computer science in Israel, worked in the medical devices industry, and now writes custom software for a living. He believes that everyone should contribute something positive to society, commensurate with their personal strengths.

François Marier

François is a free software developer from New Zealand involved in the Debian and Mozilla projects. He is particularly interested in privacy and decentralized technologies.

Dao Nguyen

Dao started with the FSF as a volunteer in August 2013. Prior to this, she spent many years in software sourcing and licensing for the Telecom industry. She has a BA in Quantitative Economics and Decision Sciences from the University of California San Diego. She currently lives in Thailand and splits her time between the FSF and charity fund-raising for AMCHAM Thailand's Adopt-A-School program helping underprivileged schools in provinces in Thailand.

Vinay Kumar Singh

Vinay is studying Law (LL.B.) with focus on copyright, patents, trademarks and designs at IIT, Kharagpur, India. Prior to starting law school he worked in the IT service industry for around four. He also completed IT Project Management program from IIT Bombay and B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering.

Nuno Brito

Nuno Brito is a licensing compliance engineer and has worked with the European defense and aerospace industries since 2000. He is a software engineering alumnus from the Carnegie Mellon University and believes that sharing code with others brings a better society to exist.

Sara Bennett

Sara R. Bennett is a student at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. She is interested in the intersection of law, technology, and civil rights. Sara has worked on surveillance and civil rights issues for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She views code as speech and believes that free software is crucial to improving society. She has a background in law enforcement, information design for journalism, and teaching.

Luigi Bai

Luigi is from Houston, Texas and has been a volunteer with since mid-2009. He has been programming since the mid-80's, and started using GNU software (GCC on mag tapes!) in 1991 or so. After 20 years in the software industry, I decided to go to law school part time as a software analyst. He graduated from University of Houston Law Center in August 2013.

Legal Team

When we need legal assistance with anything, our attorneys at the Software Freedom Law Center can always answer our questions.