In the age of open source and large scale outsourcing, assuring the quality of software must comprise ascertaining its legal compliance as well. Numerous legal cases in recent years have highlighted the business risks and the enormous costs incurred when this is not done properly.

Legal Issues about Contributing Code to GNU --- Project GNU has to be careful to obey intellectual property laws, even though these laws are wrong and people generally should share useful information without hesitation, because we are in the public eye. This means that if you want to contribute software, you have to do something to give us legal permission to use it.

We just published an article about contribution agreements for free software projects from our president Richard Stallman.

Open source licenses help to define the terms and conditions of software use and redistribution. But what are the terms and condition under which developers actually contribute code? That's the realm of software contribution agreements.

Microsoft has made a business out of selling licenses to run software that can be copied at no marginal cost, this everybody knows. Essentially, they manufacture software, but their product isn’t computer code, it’s legal code. Contracts.

RMS: Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good.

Hello everbody. The title says it all. The good people at SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo offered our readers a super-discount: just mention the coupon code FSM8X and receive a 40% (forty percent!) discount on your SCALE tickets!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy SCALE!

After 2 years of operation, FSFE's Shane Coughlan has built a legal network of 145 experts, has organised the first European conference for free software legal issues, and worked on GPL enforcement and producing documentation. For the curious, here's a general status report.

The long running case of Jacobsen v. Katzer has been settled on terms favourable to Jacobsen, a developer of the Java Model Railroad Interface project. The case came about when Katzer incorporated Jacobsen's code into it's proprietary model trail software, after deleting the copyright notices that existed in the code.