Panel: Licenses, corporations, community, and collaboration

328 | Sat 02 Aug 2 p.m.–2:45 p.m.

Presented by

  • Josh Triplett

    Josh Triplett
    @josh_triplett
    https://joshtriplett.org/

    Josh Triplett is a Rust developer on the language, library, and Cargo teams. Josh cares about building welcoming, inclusive communities that lift people up, building solutions to systemic problems, and writing low-level systems code in high-level Rust. Josh founded buildit.dev to help people build software faster and more easily. Josh has previously presented at RustConf, Kernel Summit, linux.conf.au, Linux Plumbers Conference, Embedded Linux Conference, LinuxCon, PyCon, FOSDEM, Open Source Bridge, and the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

  • Eric Schultz

    Eric Schultz
    https://wwahammy.com

    Eric Schultz is a Digital Autonomy activist and Project Leader for the Houdini Project who is passionate about the promise and reality of free and open source software for user empowerment, especially those from marginalized groups. Currently, he's a Senior Software Engineer at Software for Good GBC. Previously, he worked as Chief Technology Officer at CommitChange until becoming CommitChange Technical Lead upon the project’s acquisition. Before starting at CommitChange, in addition to software engineering, Eric served as Community Manager for multiple open source foundations, consulted with organizations on building open source software projects and advised the FCC on technical and practical issues around open source router technology. Eric lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where outside of work he enjoys watching the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Bucks and researching family history.

  • Kate Downing

    Kate Downing
    https://katedowninglaw.com/

    Kate Downing is a solo practitioner specializing in open source licensing and compliance. She works with start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and companies of all sizes in between to help them choose open source licensing strategies, choose and configure open source compliance tools, establish company-wide policies and workflows, and otherwise create simple, effective processes for OSS compliance, contributions, and open-sourcing of future projects. She has also written extensively on machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies and counsels many clients in this domain. Before starting her own practice in 2017, Kate led a team of 12 open source attorneys at VMware, and built an open source compliance process from scratch as ServiceNow's first product counsel. Kate is the co-chair of the Practicing Law Institute's annual OSS program. Kate is a board member for the PolyForm Project and a member of the Blue Oak Council.

  • Marc Jones

    Marc Jones

  • McCoy Smith

    McCoy Smith
    @mccoysmith
    https://www.lexpan.law

    McCoy Smith is an intellectual property attorney at Lex Pan Law LLC in Portland, Oregon. He is registered to practice in Oregon, Washington, California & New York as well as with the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. He is a frequent writer and presenter on open source legal and compliance topics, and authored two chapters in the Oxford University Press publication “ Open Source Law, Policy and Practice.”

Abstract

Confirm or deny: Free and open source software licenses should provide a framework for collaboration between any and all individuals and entities interested in working on and using the covered code, including hobbyists, freelancers, corporations, and nonprofit organizations. If not true, what should we do instead? If true, how is our current set of licenses performing in this area, especially considering wrinkles like SaaS and patents? Furthermore, we've seen some modifications published as "additional terms" and as new licenses -- how have these efforts played out and do we expect to see more of them? We'll hear from panelists with expertise in diverse related areas, and invite questions from the audience.

Videos

Available sources: