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For FOSDEM 2012, held last weekend in Brussels, I had the privilege of co-organizing (with Tom Marble, Karen Sandler, and Bradley Kuhn) the first-ever DevRoom track devoted to discussion of legal issues relating to free/libre/open source software. With several thousand attendees and hundreds of sessions, FOSDEM is one of the largest FLOSS conferences in the world, and surely the largest in Europe. This makes it all the more remarkable that FOSDEM is a free-admission, non-commercial community event, organized and administered entirely by volunteers.

The idea of a Legal DevRoom being untested, FOSDEM's organizers gave us a single day and a relatively small room. Our basic goal was to » Read more

Meet Scott Nesbitt. He's a freelance writer and consultant in Toronto, Canada. He uses open source tools for more than 85 percent of the work he does. He's idealistic about more getting more open data from our governments. Nesbitt also contributes to FLOSS Manuals (FLOSS stands for Free/Libre open source software) by helping to document open source projects. Documentation for the win!

On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles--things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. We hope you enjoy getting to know Scott. » Read more

Like many, I was surprised-but-not-really when Pamela Jones announced that she would be retiring original content on the legal analysis site that grew to fame within and without the open source community as it rose to do battle with the incredibly audacious claims by The SCO Group that Linux was directly derived from UNIX. » Read more

The fact that the State Department hosted a conference last week on open source shows how far the U.S. Federal Government has come in terms of tech policy. Yet the content at Tech@State: Open Source often illustrated that the road ahead is still long and arduous. » Read more

At opensource.com, we often talk about ways to build and nourish communities. But sometimes what you do right is less important than what you’re doing wrong. We dug through our archives looking for cautionary tales that show how communities break down—or never begin to flourish in the first place. » Read more

Last week I attended the EPIC conference in New York City. One of the more interesting topics came by way of Saudi Arabia. If you haven’t heard of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, you’re missing out on one of the grander experiments at the intersection of government, culture, economic development, and academia.   » Read more

Graham Taylor of OpenForum Europe (OFE) and  Karsten Gerloff of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) cite standardization policy as the principal battleground for free software & open source communities in Europe.  As Taylor observes, “We [OFE] identified that 90% of the public sector had lost their choice about freely choosing the next step [of software procurement], using all proprietary technologies.”   » Read more