Eben Moglen

Eben Moglen (* 1959) is Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School in New York.

Life

He is a pro bono general counsel of the Free Software Foundation and Founder and Chairman of the company founded in February 2005, Software Freedom Law Center.

Moglen believes that free software is an important precondition for a democratic and free society, since we are surrounded by technical equipment and dependent. Only if the control on this technique by free software open to all, so Moglen, a distribution of power was possible.

The widespread view that Eben Moglen was involved in the creation of the GNU General Public License is wrong: Moglen has worked for the FSF only since 1994, the GPL but was formulated before 1989. Main author of the GNU General Public License, Richard Stallman, was it legally advised by Jerry Cohen. Moglen, however, was involved in an advisory capacity to the version 3 of the GPL.