Collaboration Summit 2015

FOSS exists in all levels of a supply chain, from the first software developer creating software all the way to the final packaged product that is sold to end users. However in the context of a commercial supply chain the current FOSS ecosystem is broken. If a supply chain can be compared to a stream or a river, as software flows down the supply chain – i.e., when software is delivered from one company to the next -- each successive downstream company is redoing portions of the compliance work already done (or what should have been done) by the upstream company. This is all done at unnecessary cost, inefficiency and often delays time-to-market. The OpenChain working group seeks to collaborate on a proposed process conformance standard that would allow companies in a supply chain to mutually assist each other to save time and cost – all while reducing legal risk overall.

This is an inside look of the state of compliance from the perspective of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit charitable organization that is the most active in the field. Karen will give an overview of where things are with compliance initiatives and a roundup of Conservancy's current work in this area.

I contend that software standards specifications are source code. They are intended so that human beings and computers can compile them into workable implementations. They have no other purpose. The notion that software specifications deserve some special protection is an antiquated ANSI orthodoxy inherited from the time when railroad trains and the railroad barons of the day required standard gauge tracks in order to enable commerce. Now what is required for commerce is very different: We require the freedom to create derivative works. This is a fundamental principle of the Open Source Definition and part of the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation. It is the basis for Linux. I personally recommend either the Creative Commons CC0 or CC-BY licenses for software specifications and will spend part of my talk explaining why.

Open data is a hot trend, with a lot of parallels to the early days of FOSS. This talk will introduce the major projects and trends in the space, the background law that governs the topic in the US, EU, and Asia, and the key licenses in the space. The material will be necessarily somewhat introductory in nature, given the immature state of the area.

The physical reality on how software is constructed today (e.g., combining many components from various different sources) logically implies that the licensing of modern day software is best represented as a composite set of licenses. That is a change from the traditional single license designation. Composite licensing is a byproduct of wide spread source code sharing, where sharing is the underling force behind the open source movement’s success. A project’s licensing composition evolves as it borrows (copies) source code from other projects with different licensing. We use a simple molecular physics analogy (e.g., atom/molecule construction) to represent how software is constructed and then use that information to determine software licensing obligations of a program (or library) derived from different sources under different licenses. 

FLOSS communities rely on trademarks to identify their projects and their code. Yet, communities differ on their levels of investment in their trademarks, including registration and enforcement. This presentation will focus on how FLOSS communities can use trademarks to protect the work of their contributors. I will discuss the benefits of project branding, trademark registration, and trademark policy adoption; I will also present a few case studies relating to FLOSS trademark enforcement, and provide a synopsis of Conservancy's efforts to protect and defend one of our more visbile member projects' trademark.

Collaborative communities create popular work with widely recognized brands, such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Firefox. Trademark law can provide protections to members of these communities and the users of their products so that they can rely on the brands to identify the original projects. But trademark law also requires centralized quality control and various formalities that are inconsistent with the decentralized nature of collaborative communities. This talk explores how to reconcile trademark law with free culture values and how collaborative communities have “hacked” trademark law. We will also discuss CollabMark, a project to make trademarks more accessible for free culture and open source communities.

Hear from Mark Radcliffe, Partner at DLA Piper, as he discusses the changes in FOSS enforcement and the rise of commercial enforcers for FOSS. These changes dramatically raise the risk of failing to have manage compliance with FOSS licenses. He will discuss the Versata dispute and discuss best practices for companies for FOSS compliance.

Andrew will explore common ways in which commercial enterprises are leveraging open-source development and distribution models to generate revenue including support, maintenance, and related services and open-core, open platform, dual, and "freemium" licensing. Andrew will also provide examples of open-source project governance models used for commercialized open-source projects such as Android.