This September I co-chaired the Practising Law Institute’s annual “Open Source Software – From Compliance to Cooperation” program with Heather Meeker. The program is a day-long continuing legal education event with a variety of open source licensing and compliance experts covering both introductory and advanced topics as well as recent developments in OSS licensing. We had an all-star lineup this year, so it’s a terrific way for attorneys to pick up 6 CLE credits, including 1 elimination of bias credit.
As part of the program, Aaron Williamson of Williamson Legal (former counsel for the Software Freedom Law Center and general counsel to the Fintech Open Source Foundation) and I did a session titled “OSS in Transactions, Licensing and M&A” where we did a deep dive on contractual provisions related to open source software and provided some advice on where and how they should be implemented. Our slides are available for download here. Our presentation was loosely based on a white paper we co-authored titled “IoT and the Special Challenges of Open Source Software Licensing,” which will be published shortly in the ABA’s Landslide magazine. I’ll update this blog with a link once it’s online.
