Legal issues affect open source contributors and decision makers the whole time, but they can be tools rather than traps. This session considers licensing, patents, trademarks and community governance in a practical, accessible way for business managers and software development leaders.
Introduction to open source legal issues for decision makers :
Open source developers & legal topics
Current topics in open source related to legal topics
How do I fix my procurement to use more open source?
Rebooting OSI's licensing pages
Why do you still think you need copyright assignment?
Open source licenses and cloud deployment
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11:00 Introduction: Simon Phipps & Bruno Cornec, Track Chairs
11:05 Recent Trends in Open Source Licensing, Richard Fontana
Over the past couple of years there have been influential claims that the "market share" among open source projects for the long-dominant GPL license family has been shrinking, in favor of noncopyleft licenses such as the Apache License 2.0. In this talk I will critically examine such claims and place them in historical context. I will argue that there are a number of reasons why a GPL decline might be expected to have occurred (regardless of what particular statistics purport to show), both intrinsic and extrinsic to the GPL family itself. I will discuss some of the interesting reactions to the supposition of GPL decline, particularly from copyleft advocates. The possibility of a more significant role for weak copyleft licenses (particularly MPL 2.0 and EPL) in projects of commercial significance will be examined, and I will discuss ways in which interest in strong copyleft licensing might be increased, and why this is of value. I will briefly discuss the license-drafting project I recently initiated (copyleft-next), which in many respects is a reaction to my thoughts about the possibility of a decline in GPL dominance.
11:30 SpagoBI suite: moving from LGPLv2 to MPLv2: lesson learned, business and community improvement, Gabrielle Ruffatti
At beginning of 2002 I was excited when the new Mozilla Public License v2 was announced: a significant step to simplify the OSS licensing approach. The new MPLv2 is really a simpler, shorter, understandable (also by non legal people), modern license favoring code reuse and redistribution because it solves major compatibility issues. After few months, SpagoWorld board decided to explore how to move the open source licenses adopted by the projects from LGPLv2 to MPLv2 starting from SpagoBI suite. An opportunity to assess the current status of the compliance of the licenses of the various software components included in the project, to modernize the project license choice and to provide more flexibility to users. What were the challenges, the process and the impact on the SpagoBI community? 3 months after the release of the new licensed suite version, what are the results and the impact on related business activities? Lessons learned and practical tips.
12:55 Collaborative GPL Compliance Through Non-Profit Entities, Bradley Kuhn
The Software Freedom Conservancy recently announced a renewed effort for cross-project collaborative GPL compliance efforts that includes copyright holders from BusyBox, Linux, and Samba. Conservancy built an internal system of communication and collaboration to take input from all stakeholders to discuss and engage in compliance activity to ensure compliance with the GPL throughout the technology industry and in particular in the embedded device market where Linux, BusyBox and Samba are so prevalent. In this talk, Executive Director of Conservancy, Bradley M. Kuhn, will discuss how Conservancy handles compliance matters, what matters it focuses on, and how the copyright holders that work with Conservancy engage in a collaborative effort to ensure compliance with the GPL.
12:20 Patents and Cloud Deployment, Robert Blasi
End users and companies are moving away from proprietary IT infrastructures to hosted services, and patent holders are not far behind them. Come join Robert Blasi, a patent attorney with extensive experience in open source and cloud computing, for a discussion of patents and how they apply to cloud computing, and how to address these issues in your cloud initiatives.
12:45 Panel - The impact of Open Source on Standards in a FRAND background, Hervé Rannou
13:25 Conclusion
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