Don't Fear the Patent Clause!
Schedule

Presented by:

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Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the world's largest patent non-aggression community which serves Linux, GNU, Android and other key FOSS projects. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator for it's new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Several different patent clauses are embedded in modern open source licenses and there's some confusion about exactly what they each mean. Most developers would prefer to have nothing to do with patents or patent clauses, but avoiding the topic isn't a smart strategy. None of the popular clauses have been tested in court, so no one can predict exactly how the courts might deal with hybrid copyright and patent licenses.

That said, savvy open source participants can still make some reasonable assumptions based on the license author's intentions, trends in patent law and the way other common open source licenses have functioned. Understanding the players and the history that lead to patent clauses in open source licenses will help practitioners make informed choices about what licenses to apply to their own work and how these various licenses can help large multi-stakeholder projects.

Date:
2018 April 29 - 03:45
Duration:
45 min
Room:
CC-114
Conference:
LinuxFest Northwest 2018
Language:
Track:
Infrastructure
Difficulty:
Medium

Happening at the same time:

  1. ROSECODE
    2. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    G-103

  2. Don't Fear the Patent Clause!
    3. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-114

  3. Incident Response with Live Linux Forensics
    4. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-200

  4. Privacy on the blockchain
    5. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    HC-108

  5. Hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure as code using Terraform
    6. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-208

  6. Arduino, ESP8266 and 433 Mhz Devices
    7. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-236

  7. Old Dogs & New Tricks
    8. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-115

  8. Using osquery via Fleet for Client/Server visibility
    9. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    CC-235

  9. Picking Up the Pieces, Issues And Challenges Controlling Your Data
    10. Start Time:
    2018 April 29 03:45

    Room:
    HC-103 Postgres