Scott K Peterson

509 points

Massachusetts

Scott Peterson is a member of the Red Hat legal team. Long ago, an engineer asked Scott for legal advice on a curious document known as the GPL. That fateful question began a twisting path of exploration of the legal aspects of collaborative development, including both technical standards and open source software.

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Authored Content

a magnifying glass looking at a brain illustration

Why so little love for the patent grant in the MIT License?

Conventional wisdom says the Apache License has a "real" patent license. But what about the MIT License?

Platform wars: software patents in a new light

The source code is the license

For open source software, license information is embedded in the source code. To reduce complexity, you can generate different views.

What's the difference between open source software and free software?

Free software, open source software, FOSS, FLOSS. Are they the same? Different? Does it matter?

sticky notes making a palm tree on an island

If you were on a desert island, which license would you take with you?

Open source licenses give the permission necessary to remove the restrictions created by copyright law.

The Mozilla Public License - almost 2.0 (part 1)

Open source licenses are shared resources

One can easily see examples of software as a shared resource, whether shared by a few people or a few million people. Of course, these shared resources are not always as fully…

GPL enforcement action in Hellwig v. VMware dismissed, with an appeal expected

A decision in the GPL enforcement case in Germany between Christoph Hellwig (supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy) and VMware recently became public. The court…