LCA 2009 co-organiser just 'likes keeping busy'

Sam Varghese
Friday, 12 December 2008 03:32

Opinion and Analysis

As a qualified lawyer, Powell takes issue with my characterisation of members of that profession as people who dislike Linux. I point him to the arguments I once made in support of this contention and this is when he really gets voluble.

"The area of IP law that affects OSS and CC licences is a real hot topic in law at the moment and I think the challenge to the IP orthodoxy actually excites most lawyers," he says. "There are certainly some very robust debates going on in industry, legal and academic circles about the legal, moral and economic impact that the OSS and CC forms of licensing model poses to the current model of IP licensing and distribution - that makes it exciting for lawyers (as well as everyone else!)."

"As far as depriving lawyers of revenue is concerned (as you state in the article) I'd imagine that IP advice costs the same whether you're asking about OSS or proprietary licences," he adds.

"You made the point in the article that lawyers don't like to settle cases, that's not true. Any decent lawyer will settle a case if the settlement is reasonable, in fact a vast majority of cases are settled. Although lawyers like money, they also like keeping their clients and bleeding clients dry over expensive court cases doesn't (help to) keep clients.

"Taking a case to court is a serious risk and in many cases where you might think the lawsuit is somewhat dubious in nature, it is the client driving it against their lawyer's advice."

Powell's interest in technology was fuelled by his first computer, which his parents got him in 1985. He refers to it as "a very cool, still functioning Tandy TRS80 CoCo2."

"My parents refused to but me games and merely supplied me a programming book and told me I could either earn pocket money doing chores and buy my own games or write my own - I chose to write my own, I hate doing chores.

At home he uses Ubuntu, but isn't too troubled about distros. "Up until recently I used Mandriva, but I put Ubuntu on my machine after a HDD failure and I haven't really bothered changing it. I haven't really tried a distro I didn't like but then my computing needs are generally pretty modest. I like XFCE as a desktop environment because it's small and light and easy and flexible to configure but then I've also got a soft spot for the light window managers like Fluxbox and WindowMaker."