Meeting Will Bring Together Prominent Lawyers of the Free and Open Source Software Community and Provide Free Legal Education to the Public

Meeting Will Bring Together Prominent Lawyers of the Free and Open Source Software Community and Provide Free Legal Education to the Public

"The changes mandated by the European Commission in Microsoft's interoperability licences will continue to block Open Source developers, legal experts on this type of software say..."

Latest examples of Microsoft's strategy, wherein it sends out affiliates to pretend to be FOSS people and then promote software patent deals, separation between Open Source and Free software, departure from the GPL, promotion of "open" core (proprietary) as "Open Source", and demotion of free/libre platforms like GNU/Linux along with free suites/formats like ODF

There has been so much talk in the last two weeks that Microsoft has changed with regard to its patent policy toward Free Software. We fool ourselves if we trust any of the window-dressing that Microsoft has put forward to convince us that we can trust them in this regard.

The second issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has just been published online. It contains new articles from FOSS legal experts like Karen F. Copenhaver (Linux Foundation), Tiki Dare (Sun) and Harvey Anderson (Mozilla). The press release contains endorsements by William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel, Google and Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Centre.

"...The announcement confirmed that Microsoft was planning to use its software patent portfolio against interoperating products by requiring a patent license for all commercial activity [...] Microsoft's patent licences are incompatible with Free Software [...] Free Software's freedoms to use, study, share and improve software without additional restrictions are key to the success and utility of Free Software in both commercial and non-commercial ICT infrastructure. They are also the basis for many of today's working examples of interoperability and competition..."

"... «By publishing this guide, we hope to share our knowledge, just as free software developers do when they share their creations with the world» said James Vasile, Counsel at SFLC. «I take great pride in this work put together by my colleagues, and I expect that it will be especially useful to developers of free software.» ..."

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global grassroots effort to promote and build awareness of the importance of free document formats in particular and open standards in general. If you have ever received a document from a friend that your software could not open, then you know the frustration of proprietary formats.