Top 10 FOSS legal stories in 2016 (opensource.com)

Mark Radcliffe surveys the most important legal issues surrounding free and open-source software on opensource.com. "The challenge for the Linux community is to decide when to bring litigation to enforce the GPLv2. What it means in many situations is that to be compliant is currently left to individual contributors rather than being based on a set of community norms. As Theodore Ts'o noted, this issue really concerns project governance. Although permitting individual contributors to make these decisions may be the Platonic ideal, the tradeoff is ambiguity for users trying to be compliant as well as the potential for rogue members of the community (like McHardy) to create problems. The members of the Linux community and other FOSS communities need to consider how they can best assist the members of their community to understand what compliance means and to determine when litigation might be useful in furtherance of the community's goals."

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