New Legal Center for Open Source Projects

The Software Freedom Law Center has been established to “provide legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software”. From the article:

“The Law Center is being established to provide legal services to protect the legitimate rights and interests of free and open-source software projects and developers, who often do not have the means to secure the legal services they need,” Moglen said in a statement.
Overseeing the Software Freedom Law Center will be Moglen; Diane Peters, OSDL's general counsel; Daniel Weitzner, the principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and author. A nice list of reps indeed. With such a small initial staff, a lot of case work may be unlikely, but this is yet another step (and there seem to be a lot of them lately) in Open Source growing up. In somewhat related news, OSDL recently hired Samba creator Andrew Tridgell and said the same $10 million legal defense fund that will be used to defend Torvalds from legal attack will extend to Tridgell as well. Nice!
–jeremy