Richard Fontana

The organizers of the Legal and Policy DevRoom for FOSDEM 2021 discuss together the issues they've seen over the last year in FOSS, and consider what we can learn from the presentations on the track this year, and look forward together about the future of FOSS policy.

The organizers of the Legal and Policy DevRoom for FOSDEM 2021 discuss together the issues they've seen over the last year in FOSS, and consider what we can learn from the presentations on the track this year, and look forward together about the future of FOSS policy.

Other people: Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler Max Mehl Alexander Sander

The Legal & Policy Issues DevRoom Organizers gather to reflect on our DevRoom talks and FOSS issues of the day

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

The organizers of the Legal & Policy Issues DevRoom will reflect on recent developments in software freedom policy and law, and will discuss some of the topics and issues raised in this year's and past year's DevRooms.

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

The organizers of the Legal & Policy Issues DevRoom will reflect on recent developments in software freedom policy and law, and will discuss some of the topics and issues raised in this year's and past year's DevRooms.

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

Companies who use and contribute to free and open source often have internal advocates who make policy decisions, help with tooling recommendations, and teach others about the importance of free and open source. Different offices and departments will often have differences in the ways they are managing using, contributing to, and releasing free and open source software.

The panel will explore the different approaches companies have to this work.

Other people: Carol Smith Jilayne Lovejoy Max Sills

During the last few years there has been significant debate over approaches to GPL enforcement in technical and legal communities. This talk presents a new and unique vendor perspective on free software license enforcement that emphasizes the goal of fostering greater collaboration and participation in community development and highlights the importance of transparency regarding funding relationships and conflicts of interest arising out of enforcement activities.

During the last few years there has been significant debate over approaches to GPL enforcement in developer and legal communities. This talk presents a unique vendor perspective on free software license enforcement that has been shaped by deep organizational involvement in free software development, longstanding cultural ties to GPL-using communities, and a strong corporate emphasis on ethical conduct.

Where compliance efforts adhere strictly to certain principles, they can provide a legitimate mechanism for ensuring that everyone plays by the rules established by the community through the license. But the ultimate objective of enforcement should be to foster greater collaboration and participation in community development.

The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement published in 2015 by the Software Freedom Conservancy and Free Software Foundation represent a good first step in articulating an appropriately principled basis for copyleft enforcement. However, there are some gaps in the Principles that should be addressed by communities supportive of license enforcement. In particular, for enforcement to have community legitimacy, there needs to be an expectation of disclosure of funding relationships and exposure and resolution of the potential conflicts of interest that may arise in enforcement activity.

Your workplace can exert a lot of control over how much free software you use, what you're allowed to work on in your own time and what kinds of tools you become an expert in. New employees don't always negotiate their contracts to make sure they can continue contributing to free software and current employees aren't always successful at advocating for using free software tools, choosing free software technologies or contributing changes back upstream when they do rely on free software. We'll address what's possible, what your legal department is likely to be concerned about and how to be a smooth negotiator at work. Many companies could benefit tremendously from using FLOSS, but free software enthusiasts and institutional gatekeepers are coming from very different perspectives. Free software developers and users tend to be most familiar with free software's benefits when compared to proprietary solutions; user freedom, reusing code, public code review for bugs, increased project capacity and cost. The uninitiated may -- unfortunately -- be most familiar with the risks, some real and some perceived. Employers also benefit from having workers who are passionate about their work, are well-connected to the free software community and are constantly learning about new technologies from their peers outside the company, but new employee contracts rarely recognize this unless you ask. Conversations about contracts, choosing new technologies and sharing an employee's work with another entity are high stakes negotiations. With a solid understanding of what worries and motivates the other parties, you can become a savvy advocate for free software at work. This talk will help you gather information, frame the conversation and make the best possible case for using and contributing to free software at work.

Other people: Deb Nicholson

Nonprofit organizations, commonly (though inaccurately) called "foundations" in the free software and open source world, now play an important role in the project landscape, especially for projects having high commercial significance. This talk will critically examine purported benefits of open source foundations and will discuss their drawbacks. Possibilities for reform of open source foundations, and alternatives to foundations, will be considered.

Nonprofit organizations, commonly (though inaccurately) called "foundations" in the free software and open source world, now play an important role in the governance of many well-known projects. Larger, popular and commercially-significant projects are likely to be criticized if they don't create a foundation or affiliate with an existing one, especially if the project appears to be controlled by narrow corporate interests.

Foundations are generally assumed to be a good solution for project governance, at least if "foundation proliferation" is avoided. In the past few years a number of advocates of foundations have spoken about various political, legal, social and fiscal benefits that are said to be associated with such forms of governance.

This talk will provide a skeptical and critical examination of the supposed benefits of open source foundations. The talk will also discuss various drawbacks to foundations that have not commonly been acknowledged. The two main types of foundations (charities and trade associations) will be contrasted. Possibilities for reform of foundations to address some of their problems, and alternatives to foundation governance, will be considered.

We will provide an overview of the advanced topics presented in the Legal and Policy Issues Devroom

Introduction to the Legal and Policy Issues Devroom

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn

This talk will propose several ideas for inclusion in a set of modern legal standards for good practices in FLOSS development and governance beyond the traditional emphasis on software freedom-conformant source code licensing. The theme will be maximizing diverse, egalitarian and authentically meritocratic participation, minimizing legal impediments, and avoiding distortion or corruption by powerful project stakeholders. Ideas to be discussed include distributed and symmetrical copyright licensing, fair trademark policies, appropriate approaches to patent nonassertion by corporate participants, and commitments by projects or associated foundations to promoting diverse and safe environments for development work.

Ideas discussed in this talk may form the basis for work done by the Open Source Initiative during the coming year.

It was traditionally assumed that licensing of source code under a free software/open source license, with its basic forkability guarantee, was sufficient for software to be free. More recently, some have suggested that source code licensing criteria is insufficient to capture what is truly normative in the development and governance of FLOSS projects, but no settled view on what constitutes "open development" or "good FLOSS governance" has yet emerged.

While some ideas that have been suggested for defining so-called "open development" and good project governance focus on technical criteria, this talk will discuss those that are essentially legal in nature, and the policy justifications for their inclusion. At root these concern the desire to maximize diverse participation on an egalitarian and authentically meritocratic basis with a minimum of legal or other structural impediments, and an avoidance of distorting or corrupting influence by relatively powerful or influential project participants or governance stakeholders.

Important examples of such legal criteria include distributed copyright ownership coupled with symmetrical inbound/outbound licensing, as well as community fairness in trademark policy formulation and the arguable need for external mechanisms of patent nonassertion for projects dominated by corporate contribution. I will also argue that it is an essential legal feature of good governance for projects or their affiliated foundations to affirmatively prevent or police abusive or exclusionary behavior by project participants. Some focus will be placed on problems presented by large-scale, well-known projects that receive significant corporate participation.

Now in its fourth year, the FOSDEM Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom covers topics of licensing, legal, governance issues, and more as it relates to Open Source and Free Software projects.

Attendees are welcome to come and engage in lively debate with our excellent speakers. Please come with your questions, comments or concerns. The DevRoom talks are carefully chosen to avoid merely being introductory: we believe that FOSDEM attendees are well informed on these issues, and we welcome participation for all. Our goal in organizing this DevRoom is to bring the previously secretive and non-public discussion on these sorts of issues to a public forum.

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

This talk critiques what passes for orthodox license compatibility doctrine and suggests ways of adjusting how we interpret licenses (and therefore how we think about compatibility) to reconcile formalist notions of incompatibility with actual behavior by FLOSS community developers.

License compatibility is generally understood to refer to the problem of creating combined works out of code under different, clashing FLOSS licenses. Usually, it is seen as an issue only if at least one of the licenses in question is copyleft.

A surprising amount of intellectual energy among members of free software and free culture communities has been devoted to dealing with the issue of license compatibility. The same can be said of open source legal specialists associated with the more sophisticated corporate open source vendors, as well as companies in the business of selling tools and services to aid corporate management of open source. In general, incompatibility seems to be spoken of as a significant compliance issue. But critical analysis of the legal assumptions underlying received wisdom about license compatibility seems to be oddly absent. Moreover, and ironically, much of that received wisdom seems to bear little relation to actual conduct by free software developers.

This talk attempts to make some sense out of the topic of license compatibility, noting where it makes sense and where it seems to lack sufficient rational underpinning. I propose ways of adjusting how we think about copyleft license interpretation to place license compatibility doctrine on more solid ground and in line with the realities of free software development.

Now in its third year, the FOSDEM Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom covers topics of licensing, legal, governance issues, and more as it relates to Open Source and Free Software projects.

Attendees are welcome to come and engage in lively debate with our excellent speakers. Please come with your questions, comments or concerns. The DevRoom talks are carefully chosen to avoid merely being introductory: we believe that FOSDEM attendees are well informed on these issues, and we welcome participation for all. Our goal in organizing this DevRoom is to bring the previously secretive and non-public discussion on these sorts of issues to a public forum.

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

Launched as a project in July 2012, copyleft-next is an effort to publicly develop a new, simple, easily-understandable and legally sound GPL-like license. copyleft-next began as a mere modification of GPLv3, but it quickly evolved into a text that is radically different from the GPL in structure and style.

This talk will discuss the substance of the current copyleft-next draft, the nature of the drafting process, and the larger issue of why such a project is worthwhile. I will describe the rationale for significant features of the copyleft-next license text, including its notable departures from GPLv2 and GPLv3. I will also explain how and why the project has adopted some of the standard methodology of public free software project development, including the use of a public git repository and a publicly-archived mailing list, a major change from earlier free software-related legal drafting efforts. The project is also noteworthy for its invention of the "Harvey Birdman Rule", which has two aims: to maximize transparency by discouraging undisclosed private negotiations over license drafting, and to limit the undue influence of interest groups far removed from the concerns of individual free software developers and users.

• https://gitorious.org/copyleft-next
• https://github.com/richardfontana/copyleft-next
• http://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/copyleft-next/

This panel will discuss the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPLv3), a copyleft license which includes a clause designed to ensure that users of network-deployed applications receive complete corresponding source code for the deployed application.

AGPLv3 has roots in the early 2000s, when some free software advocates called attention to what some described as an “Application Service Provider loophole” in GPLv2. One response was AGPLv1, a modification of GPLv2 published by Affero, Inc. and drafted with Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s help. AGPLv1 and contemporary licenses addressing this policy issue saw limited adoption..

Many expected, and some strongly advocated for, FSF to incorporate the Affero clause into GPLv3. Instead, in 2007 the FSF drafted a separate license, AGPLv3, containing an additional requirement that modified versions of a program offer access to corresponding source to all users interacting with AGPLv3'd programs through a network.

AGPLv3 has seen little adoption by individual free software developers and community projects for various reasons. Yet notable exceptions exist, such as GNU MediaGoblin. Currently, AGPLv3's most common use is by businesses as a means of promoting purchases of proprietary software licenses, a practice often criticized by some framers of AGPLv3. Meanwhile, some corporate open source users have investigated the issue of AGPLv3 compliance. Awareness of AGPLv3 has steadily increased with the growing focus on “Cloud Computing”.

This panel, comprised of a few of the world's foremost experts on AGPLv3, seeks to discuss and explain all issues surrounding AGPLv3 and contemplate the future of AGPLv3 as a viable copyleft license.

Panelists:

• Moderator: Richard Fontana, IP Counsel at Red Hat. Richard is responsible for open source legal matters at Red Hat, and in his prior role at the Software Freedom Law Center he was co-drafter of GPLv3 and AGPLv3. He is an active public speaker on FLOSS legal and policy issues.
• Eileen Evans, Vice President & Associate General Counsel, Cloud & Open Source, Hewlett-Packard Company. Eileen has spoken on complex open source issues at many open source conferences in the U.S. and in Europe and with governmental bodies, such as the European Commission and Members of the European Parliament.
• Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy and Member of FSF's Board of Directors. Kuhn invented the original Affero clause, and helped draft AGPLv1 and AGPLv3. Kuhn is also widely known for his work in Free Software licensing compliance and Free Software non-profit management.
• Christopher Allan Webber, Lead Developer, GNU MediaGoblin (free software image, audio, video publishing platform). Activist and developer for free software and network services freedom. Previously worked at Creative Commons as software engineer (and occasionally involved in licensing as well). Presently works fulltime on GNU MediaGoblin via money raised in a crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with the Free Software Foundation.

Other people: Bradley M. Kuhn Christopher Webber Eileen Evans

Brief Welcome to the Legal Policy and Issues DevRoom

Other people: Tom Marble Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler

So-called "app stores" are becoming a popular means of distributing software, particularly for mobile devices. However, the rise of app stores has been accompanied by tensions with free software/open source legal norms. Companies controlling official app distribution channels for their platforms typically place restrictive terms on both users and developers in ways that may be difficult or impossible to harmonize with requirements and expectations around FLOSS licensing. Moreover, there is a perception that noncompliance with FLOSS licenses is prevalent in app store distribution. This panel will explore some of the problems arising out of the intersection between app stores and FLOSS, under EU as well as US law, and will discuss possible solutions.

Other people: Bradley M. Kuhn Giovanni Battista Gallus Hugo Roy

Discussion of the possible decline of copyleft licensing.

During the past few years some have asserted that the use of copyleft licenses, particularly the GPL, is in decline among FLOSS projects. While the data that is said to support this contention may be suspect, it matches my own observations and experience. I examine why the GPL may really be experiencing some decline relative to noncopyleft licensing. Many factors are likely to have played a part, sometimes in contradictory or nonobvious ways, including the evolution of open source "business models", the nature of GPL enforcement and nonenforcement, the drafting of GPLv3 and its aftermath, changes in moral and legal authority surrounding the GPL, and general technological, cultural and economic developments affecting free software hackers. If it is real, the GPL's decline is a problematic development for free software culture. I propose ways in which the trajectory of relevance and influence of strong copyleft can be turned around.

Brief Welcome to the new Legal Issues DevRoom

Other people: Bradley M. Kuhn Karen Sandler Tom Marble