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Mark Webbink - Legalities and Open Source

By Mark on Jan 12, 2008 in LinuxToday, LinuxWorld, Open Source

Mark Webbink is the retired general counsel from Red Hat. He did a Q&A session that was very informative. He touched on a number of things including the general discussion on two large groups of open source licenses.

Restrictive - Those that have two restrictions that assures that the code stays open. The GPL and it’s "viral cousins"
More Liberal but Not Protective - BSD style licenses which has the benefit of potential ubiquity because the code can be used in proprietary and open source licenses.

Another fascinating conversation was the discussion on what the obligation is for open source projects to supply the source code via the web/source RPMS/etc.. The general feeling seemed to be that those who were developing software were very concerned about making sure that all the source code was made available in a convenient way. Legally, though Mark made the point to mention that you aren’t obligated to supply the source code for free. In fact you could for a reasonable fee offer the CD on CD/DVD so that the developers of free software don’t have to bear that financial burden.

There was also discussion of the resource provided by the Open Invention Network that is trying to use patents to provide a collaborative ecosystem. Open Invention Network^SM believes that one of the keys to innovation in the Linux community is the ability to share software code and ideas. Open Invention Network^SM acquires patents and makes them available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. This enables companies to make significant corporate and capital expenditure investments in Linux � helping to promote collaboration and fuel economic growth.

I was interested to hear in this session as passionate that users were in the opening remarks that no community was without problems.

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Technorati Tags: Fedora, FUDCon, Mark Webbink, Open Invention Network