Free Online Journal Targets The FOSS Legal Community

Recently, we covered a number of legal resources that can help keep open source projects and developers out of harm's way. From new types of licenses to free guides online, the number of legal tools specific to FOSS is growing, and now, lawyers focused on open source are joining forces online. As Luis Villa, a lawyer at the Mozilla Corporation notes in a blog post, there is even now a journal focused on open source law called International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.

According to Villa:

"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...Thanks to the efforts of several people, we now even have our own journal- which may not mean much to hackers, but to other lawyers it signals that we're a real intellectual community. Think of it as our (very verbose) community blog- and more importantly, just one more step to feeling connected with each other and eventually providing better services to FOSS hackers."

Villa himself is no stranger to being editor of a journal. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Science and Technology Law Review at Columbia. The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review looks pretty stark so far, with not much content posted, but there is a call for papers and you can find quite a few initial articles here. Many of the articles are in the form of case studies, and make for interesting reading.