I co-chaired the Practising Law Institute’s annual “Open Source Software 2023 – from Compliance to Cooperation” program with Heather Meeker again this September. 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.
As part of the program, Luis Villa, founder and general counsel of Tidelift, and I presented a session titled “Licensing ‘Open’ AI Models” (it’s called “Open Source and Artificial Intelligence” on the PLI site). We did a deep dive on what “open” AI licenses currently entail, the legal and technical pros and cons of using “open” AI models, the applicability of open source principles to the AI domain, and how “open” AI licenses interact with traditional OSS licenses. This presentation is useful for anyone thinking of using or releasing a publicly available AI model.
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 took a close look at contractual provisions related to open source software and provided some advice on where and how they should be implemented. Our presentation was loosely based on a white paper we co-authored titled “IoT and the Special Challenges of Open Source Software Licensing,” which was published in the ABA’s Landslide magazine.
