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

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

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.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . . . . @zacchiro . . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »