[beyond-licensing] Legal topics that FOSS projects could use more information on

[Brian Behlendorf]

Is it right to call it "dangers" when there are both pros and cons?  For 
example, it's one of the only tools we have to help retire old licenses, 
or encourage greater license compatibility (for example, when Mozilla went 
triple-licensed with GPL, LGPL, and MPL).

Also, trademark and patent rights are important IP for projects to manage, 
and benefit even less from not being managed.

Brian

On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 02:12:10PM -0400, Deb Nicholson wrote:
>> We also decided to brainstorm a list of legal topics that projects could
>> use more information on, via email. In broad strokes, we discussed the
>> interplay between patents and licensing and the impact of standards bodies.
>> The goal here is to fill the void of solid information about how these
>> issues impact open source projects.
>
> I think projects need better resources on the dangers of "copyright
> accumulation", i.e., the ability of a single player to unilaterally
> relicense the bulk of the code of a given FOSS project.
>
> The debate around this has been in the past focused around CAA/CLA, but
> those are just symptoms of the more important underlying issue of
> whether copyright in a given FOSS project is centralized in the hands of
> the few or distributed in the hands of the many.
>
> There are a pros and cons in both centralized and distributed copyright
> management, but we lack resources that our communities can be pointed to
> to grok the details.
>
> Cheers.
>