A community of FOSS lawyers?

“There is a fairly common perception among FOSS hackers that
there is no community of FOSS lawyers. Scratch the surface, though,
and it turns out that- despite our handicaps- the FOSS legal
community is there and growing. Since this question recently came
up in the context of Mozilla’s decision to revise the MPL, I
thought it might be a good time to talk about this community here
at opensource.com.

“A big part of why so many people have assumed that there is no
legal community of practice is because lawyers have a lot of
structural and cultural barriers to forming real communities of
practice. The common practice of billing by the hour encourages us
to be very skeptical of any work which doesn’t give an immediate
payoff. Our occasional arrogance about the complexity of what we do
makes it very, very hard to break down the insider/outsider
boundary. And our habitual allergy to cluetrain-style plain
English, which is so essential to a functional community that it
isn’t even mentioned in The Open Source Way, is obviously also a
problem. On top of all these other problems, the structures of
privilege, evidence, and ethics law combine to make lawyers very
nervous about discussing anything in public. We’re explicitly
taught that doing things in public has very few upsides and vast
numbers of potential downsides.”

Complete
Story