Richard is Senior Commercial Counsel on the Products and Technologies team in Red Hat's legal department. Most of his work focuses on open source-related legal issues.

Authored Content

A gavel.

Is it time to revise the Open Source Definition?

Recent developments may strengthen the case for exploring improvements to the OSD.
Richard Fontana (Red Hat) 30 Sep 2020 2 comments
Two government buildings

Should API-restricting licenses qualify as open source?

A look at how a closely-watched legal case about copyright and APIs might affect open source licensing
Richard Fontana (Red Hat) 30 Jun 2020 4 comments
Writing Hand

Why CLAs aren't good for open source

Few legal topics in open source are as controversial as contributor license agreements.
Richard Fontana (Red Hat) 28 Feb 2019 2 comments
patent illustration

An insider's look at drafting the GPLv3 license

On the 11th anniversary of the GPLv3 license, learn about its lasting contributions to free and open source software.
Richard Fontana (Red Hat) 29 Jun 2018
A gavel.

Top 10 open source legal stories that shook 2017

Take a look at some of the most important legal cases from the past year, including GitHub's revision of their Terms of Service.
Richard Fontana (Red Hat) 27 Feb 2018 1 comment
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Authored Comments

Commented on 30 Sep 2020
Is it time to revise the Open Source Definition?
Good point. The recently OSI-approved CAL has some interesting data-related provisions which broke new ground in an open source license, and there were certainly some who argued that those provisions raised OSD concerns. I...
Commented on 2 Jul 2020
Should API-restricting licenses qualify as open source?
Hi Pam, The "open source-like license" I am referring to in that paragraph is not CAL 1.0 (the license approved by the OSI earlier this year), but rather CAL 1.0-Beta, the earlier draft originally submitted by Van Lindberg...
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