tbm's blog

Licensing is an important component of every free software and open source project. This is especially true as an increasing number of corporations are adopting and distributing open source applications and code. This track considers various legal and licensing aspects of open source, both from a community and a corporate perspective.

This track is a great opportunity for you to discuss legal and licensing aspects of open source with lawyers, decision makers, open source developers and other people who are interested in legal aspects of open source.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of topics we would like to cover:

I attended LinuxTag in Berlin last week and there was a very interesting presentation about the state of Munich's migration to Linux on the desktop. Andreas Heinrich explained that their goal is to migrate 80% of the 15000 desktops to Linux. At the moment, 6200 desktops have been migrated and they intend to have a total of 8500 Linux desktops by the end of the year.

Here are some of the key lessons they shared with the audience:

I'm organizing a one-day miniconf as part of linux.conf.au (LCA) in Brisbane in January. If you'd like to present at this miniconf, please check out the CFP and get in contact with me.

We'll have a one-day session about the governance of open source at Open World Forum to which everyone is invited. Open World Forum will take place in Paris on September 30th and October 1st. The governance session will be on the second day. The talks in the morning address topics related to the adoption of open source whereas the afternoon session focuses on governance issues and best practices. Open World Forum is free of charge to attend but you have to register in advance. I hope to see many of you in Paris!

The first part of this article explained the purpose and scope of Contributor Agreements in open source projects. This article presents an overview of some Contributor Agreements that are used in the community.

Contributor Agreements come in all shape and forms, ranging from full-fledged Contributor License Agreements (CLA) that have to be signed to informal consent to some set of rules. This article will take a look at a number of different agreements in order to show that community norms can vary widely.

Apache's Individual Contributor License Agreement

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) maintains two formal Contributor License Agreements (CLA), one for individual contributors and one for corporate contributions. The Individual CLA covers the following points: