Legal Panel

Intellectual Property

The open source community creates, develops, and markets its products in an environment in which the law plays a critical role. Technology companies unaware of the legal implications of developing or incorporating open source software may risk losing key proprietary assets or may be threatened by third party intellectual property rights.

This panel will have a dual focus. Its speakers will build upon the morning session relating to the business aspects of the open source enterprise by addressing specific issues of open source licensing, such as how to select the proper license in order to successfully implement promising business models and how to avoid forfeiting proprietary technology upon incorporation of open source software. In addition, the panel will discuss questions of intellectual property law, such as how to avoid infringement of copyrights and patents in pre-existing software, how to prevent closed source competitors from hijacking open source software, and how to protect yourself against potential threats posed by the growing number of software patents.

The session is meant to increase awareness of legal issues which may be potential pitfalls for businesses relying, at least in part, on open source. However, since the session is designed to be a working session, the panel is open to any legal questions surrounding open source.

Many open-source products are given away by their creators. Many other developers would like to sell their open-source work. Commercial free (as in free speech) products are not an oxymoron, insists Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. You can charge anything you want for free software, he says, "even a billion dollars." Is he serious, or tongue in cheek?

Section 11 of the GNU General Public License (GPL)[1] says "BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE... The panel of legal experts will examine the significance of this line.

Section 6 of the Open Source Definition[2] says "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor," usually interpreted to mean any price charged must be the same for all customers. This apparently does not prevent MySQL from being free for non-profits and personal use, and have a fee for commercial use.

The panel will examine "dual licensing," under which MySQL can sell the same product under the GPL or under a special "non-GPL" license. The panel will explain how a product under a GPL can legally also be sold under a different license.

Content licensing controls the terms of use of the actual content in some CMS. The Creative Commons[3] license and the Open Content[4] license let authors move their work out from under the strict copyrights of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The panel will discuss how this is accomplished with embedded metadata.

Moderator: John Palfrey
Panelists:
Mike Olson, CEO, Sleepycat Software
Larry Rosen, Open Source Initiative
Aaron Swartz, Creative Commons
Liza Vertinsky, Wolf, Greenfield, and Sacks

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
[2] http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
[3] http://www.creativecommons.org
[4] http://www.opencontent.org/