Community Summit: Legal & Licensing
The Legal and Licensing session addresses the written rules for sharing the assets of the community. Topics to be discussed are of interest to communities and companies alike. They include contributor agreements and copyright assignments, standards for exchanging license data, open source licensing in the cloud, tools and processes to verify open source compliance, open source and patents, incorporating projects as non-profit organizations, the rise of the foundation as an organizational and legal structure for open source projects, etc.
14:00 - 14:30 Stephen Walli: FOSS Foundations Enable Community Growth
FOSS projects grow until they reach a certain size but can grow no further. FOSS Foundations enable projects to grow to reach their potential by providing the legal structures and tools to enable corporate contribution and wider adoption. This talk looks at a brief history of foundations in the FOSS space, and what tools they provide to help community projects grow.
14:30 - 15:00 Robert Blasi: Open Source Software in a World of Software Patents
Recent developments in the law have made it clear that developers will be living with software patents for the foreseeable future. Some companies are responding by amassing patents at almost unprecedented prices. How can open source companies respond to these developments? How should we be thinking about these issues? Join Robert Blasi, a patent attorney and the head of Goodwin Procter's open source licensing practice, for a discussion of patents and patent strategy for open source companies and developers. Learn how and why software companies obtain patents, how patents can help the open source community, and how to prepare yourself to do business in a world of software patents.
15:00 - 15:30 Benjamin Jean: A standard nomenclature to identify the obligations of FOSS licenses
The definitions of the Open Source Initiative (OSD) and the FSF (FSFD) are essential in the sense that they qualify Free or Open Source Licenses (FOS License) in regard to the rights and freedoms they confer (the two main lists of licenses are made on their base). However, they do not meet an other industrial need: the identification and classification of obligations (which differ between each license) for the licenses and their variants (especially when there are additional terms – for instance exceptions or interpretations).
Thus, based on existing definitions and as a complement to their action against license proliferation, it seems necessary to consider the drafting of such additional nomenclature. Indeed, this work would be useful for two reasons: to meet customer's expectation in relation with the development of services around free software (so they can state precisely, but not limited to, the type of licenses they require); and to back advances made in computerization and software identifications of the components and their licenses (both community projects like SPDX, QSOS or business's like Blackduck).
Firstly, the relevance of the approach itself will be discussed. Its sole purpose is to characterize a license or its variants on a common nomenclature (detailed and scalable), this the method can only be descriptive and cannot replace the current process of writing the licenses. It will participate in the dissemination of good practices for distributing free software, will contribute movement to the rationalization and standardization in favor of major licenses, and may possibly be based on an international standardization bodies.
The second part of the presentation will be an opportunity to present a first classification, based both on existing work on personal thoughts. Indeed, it seems possible to use the classic typology (obligation to give, to do and to not do) while adding specific references to free licenses such as obligation for the various IP rights granted - or excluded - as well as those organizing the formalism associated with the license. Finally, this classification can include other particular elements of licenses such as scope and trigger.
15:30 - 16:00 Freddy Munoz and Bruno Cornec: Tools for developers to ensure legal integrity of their code
First this talk explores the various options regarding FOSS detection, how this process can be integrated in the "software factory", and how the results can be displayed in a usable and efficient way, using different tools freely available to the open source communities like FOSSology and Antepedia Tools Suite. Secondly, we will give some example of license data that can be collected from many open source projects and show how it can be useful for communities to adopt standard like SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange), which will be presented briefly.
16:00 - 16:30 Walter van Holst: Public procurement of open source software
Public procurement of open source software: some lessons learned in the Netherlands The Netherlands was the first EU country to formulate formal policies on the promotion of open standards and open source software within its government in fall 2007. Part of that policy was mandating certain open standards in public procurement and an explicit position regarding a level playing field for open source software in public procurement. In order to facilitate this, a programme group was appointed. One aspect of the programme (called Netherlands open in Connection), which is about to end, is the ongoing monitoring of calls for tenders in order to gauge compliance with this policy. The programme also encompassed informing public bodies about this policy as well as providing advice on matters such as making government-owned software open source, implementation strategies and public procurement.
