The SFLC's Legal Guide on Free Software

[Posted February 14, 2008 by corbet]

From:		Jim Garrison <garrison-AT-softwarefreedom.org>
To:		pr-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Software Freedom Law Center Publishes Legal Guide on Free Software
Date:		Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:10:56 -0500
Message-ID:		<47B45A00.5060703@softwarefreedom.org>

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  Software Freedom Law Center Publishes Legal Guide on Free Software

Nonprofit Law Firm Continues to Provide Resources for Open Source Developers and
Community

NEW YORK, February 14, 2008 -- The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC),
provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and
Open Source Software (FOSS), today published a legal guide which acts
as an in-depth introduction to the legal issues surrounding FOSS.

The guide, written by members of SFLC's staff, covers a variety of
legal topics and their practical application to free software
development. These topics include copyrights and licensing,
organizational structure, patents, and trademarks.

"By publishing this guide, we hope to share our knowledge, just as
free software developers do when they share their creations with the
world," said James Vasile, Counsel at SFLC. "I take great pride in
this work put together by my colleagues, and I expect that it will be
especially useful to developers of free software."

The guide, titled "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free
Software Projects," is available at
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer...

SFLC distributed an earlier version of the guide to attendees of its
Legal Summit for Software Freedom, held in October. Since then, the
guide has been significantly revised and improved, resulting in the
version published online today.


About the Software Freedom Law Center

The Software Freedom Law Center -- directed by Eben Moglen, one of the
world's leading experts on copyright law as applied to software --
provides legal representation and other law-related services to
protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. The Law Center is
dedicated to assisting non-profit open source developers and projects.
Visit SFLC at http://www.softwarefreedom.org.


Media contact:

Jim Garrison
Public Relations Coordinator
Software Freedom Law Center
+1-212-461-1910
garrison@softwarefreedom.org

                                 ###

to post comments

The SFLC's Legal Guide on Free Software

Posted Feb 14, 2008 18:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

There's lots of good advice here, but also many sections appear to quietly assume that the reader is a US citizen or resident. For example, the section on whether to, and how to register copyright refers to "the federal copyright office", and the process for incorporation "varies by state".

The document should have been organized different, separating out the parts that apply internationally from the parts that are US specific; then the SFLC could ask for help from free software groups in other countries in filling in sections applicable in other countries.

The SFLC's Legal Guide on Free Software

Posted Feb 15, 2008 6:40 UTC (Fri) by nicm (guest, #50555) [Link] (1 responses)

Lots of good stuff, although I thought they should have stuck to the legal advantages of one
over the other rather than going into stuff like number of available developers and
speculation about why people use the license, both of which seem legally irrelevent

If they do have to go into advantages, they could have said more about other licenses (for
example, for what other licenses than BSD/ISC could you include /two/ examples verbatim in one
short section? - simplicity is a commonly cited benefit). Surely they could have covered more
than one type of non-GNU license, even in the first draft?

The SFLC's Legal Guide on Free Software

Posted Feb 16, 2008 0:23 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

But especially for copyleft licenses, the size of the developer community and existing codebase is critical, and trumps any supposed legal advantages, because an incompatible license restricts code reuse and sharing.

I think they didn't go into a bunch of other licenses because they didn't want to promote a whole bunch of licenses.