Open Source Delivers

Lawyers and legal organizations play a more significant role in open source than in other technical communities.  One reason is that open source software (OSS) is such a unique and interesting form of intellectual property – it’s free of charge and easy to download, but not free of obligations.  As a result, we are frequently [...]

This year, 2011, was one of the most active years in legal developments in FOSS. This activity reflects the increase in FOSS use: Laura Wurster of Gartner, noted in the Harvard Business Review blog that open source has hit a “strategic tipping point” this year with companies increasingly focused on using “open source” software for [...]

Talk to pretty much any corporate IP lawyer anywhere in the world and they will be able to articulate why it is important to put controls in place to govern the use of open source. I just completed a joint legal seminar in Tokyo with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and, as expected, everyone was [...]

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar (whoever wrote it) is one of the great speeches in all of literature. It’s designed to twist a crowd against their best interests, to win them to an empire against the republic, by laying a great man’s acts for [...]

If you’re a software developer, it’s a safe bet that you’re either working on an application for a mobile device or you’ve thought about doing that. Mobile apps are big business – Gartner predicted that there would be almost 18 billion downloads of mobile apps this year alone generating some $15 billion in sales. You’ve [...]