Thwarting Threats: Free OSS Legal Primer Boasts Big Authors

by Sam Dean - Mar. 06, 2008Comments (2)

As open source grows, so do the legal kerfuffles surrounding it. Today, Red Hat is pulling headlines for merely hiring two big gun IP attorneys, and last week Gartner researchers warned of possible strings of lawsuits from Microsoft following its new openness initiative. You can never be too careful about the law if you're working in the open source world. If you want a free, downloadable resource that does quite an exhaustive job of covering the legal issues pertaining to open source, you can now get the Software Freedom Law Center's Legal Issue Primer.

You can download the SFLC's primer as a PDF file or look at portions of it online without getting the whole document, and it's broken down into four main parts: 1) copyrights and how the prominent open source licenses approach them; 2) forming open source developers' groups; 3) patent law and how it applies to software; and 4) United States trademark law.

Here are some sample chapters and sub-chapters:

Choosing A FOSS License
The GNU General Public License
BSD-Style or Permissive Licenses
The GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Affero General Public License

Patent Defenses for FOSS Developers
License
Noninfringement
Invalidity
Noninfringement and Invalidity Opinions
Unenforceability

Probably the most useful aspect of the primer is the detailed information on how to defend yourself or your team if you receive a purported patent-backed threat. It's written by top open source software attorneys, including Richard Fontana, Bradley M. Kuhn, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Karen Sandler, and more. (Fontana, Stallman and Moglen were the three principal authors of the GNU GPL, version 3.) Even if you're not in hot water, keep it on your radar. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Do you know of any essential legal resources for the open source community?