SCALE 8x: Free software legal issues

“The casual view of open source software is that the code always
comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new
contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so
forth. But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal
framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary
software competition: the various software licenses, contribution
agreements, copyright and other “intellectual property” law. Every
once in a while, a good status check on the legal dimension is
healthy for the typical developer, and

“SCALE 8x offered just that in a series of talks. Red Hat’s
licensing and patent attorney Richard Fontana spoke about improving
the intra-community open source legal system, Bradley Kuhn of the
Software Freedom Conservancy and Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC)
spoke about the nuts-and-bolts of bringing GPL violators into
compliance, and SFLC counsel Karen Sandler presented a primer on
the often misunderstood realm of trademark law.

“Brave New World

“Fontana’s talk “Improving the Open Source Legal System” began
by exploring how the real-world practices of the open source
software community diverge from the legal realities on which the
community depends. He then questioned what the differences reveal
about the structure of the community, and suggested steps that
major players like Linux distributions and large software projects
could take to shore up some of the common misunderstandings and
loopholes.”

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