Sessions at OSCON 2011 about Legal

Thursday 28th July 2011

• Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful

  by Richard Fontana

  Formal contributor agreements give rise to a number of social, economic and ethical problems, threatening to undermine many of the advantages of open source development, without offering any real legal benefits. Projects and their sponsoring organizations should implement explicit but informal contribution policies that are grounded in free software tradition and that encourage community-building.

  • Legal

  At 1:40pm to 2:20pm, Thursday 28th July

  In E146, Oregon Convention Center

• Legal Basics for Developers

  by Aaron Williamson and Karen Sandler

  A discussion of fundamental legal concepts for free/open source software developers, focusing on the topics that projects most commonly face: copyrights, trademarks, patents, and incorporation.

  • Legal
  • Open Source

  At 2:30pm to 3:10pm, Thursday 28th July

  In E146, Oregon Convention Center

Friday 29th July 2011

• 12 Years of Copyleft License Compliance: A Historical Perspective

  by bkuhn

  This talk surveys the FLOSS copyleft compliance problems that were and are encountered, and how they have changed historically. Much progress has been made since the 1990s, but widespread adoption of GPL'd and LGPL'd software in embedded systems has led to more violations than ever before. This talk explains how our community meets these challenges to improve worldwide copyleft compliance.

  • Embedded Systems
  • GNU Public License
  • Legal
  • Licensing
  • Open Source

  At 11:00am to 11:40am, Friday 29th July

  In E146, Oregon Convention Center