The GNU General Public License Version 2 ( GPLv2) continues to be the most widely used and most important license for free and open source software. Black Duck Software…
With a recent op-ed in the Economist and a segment on NPR's Planet Money, it seems as if an awareness of the high cost of the outmoded, traditional patent system is finally…
Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York…
The publication, Guide to Owning Transparency: How Federal Agencies Can Implement and Benefit from Transparency, was released earlier this month and is the result of an…
Patent trolling—the aggressive assertion of weak or meritless patent claims by non-practicing entities—is a frequent target of disdain from open source enthusiasts. Thus it…
Drafting and using open licenses for data and hardware presents both familiar old challenges (like license proliferation) and new challenges (like less developed legal…
The year 2013 continued the trend of the increasing importance of legal issues for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. FOSS projects have increased from 900…
The patent troll problem is not a new one. In 1879, an inventor by the name of George B. Selden filed a patent on a horseless four-wheeled carriage, which he called the "Road…
Many organizations use at least some open source code within their programs. So it is surprising that recent graduates who work with companies using open source software are…
The first instance of a court in Germany (and perhaps anywhere) addressing GPLv3 occurred in a decision by the Regional Court of Halle in July 2015. GPLv2, first published in…
Even as the US government bids adieu to Clipper Chip, an infamous episode that influenced the cryptography debate for years, there is renewed focus in a number of quarters…
For many years, the open source software community has made the distinction between "free as in freedom" (the software can be used or modified as the user sees fit) and "free…