The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities
- 4h 54m
- Heather J. Meeker
- John Wiley & Sons (US)
- 2008
This book is a user manual for understanding and deployment of open source software licensing in business. Written for lawyers and businesspeople alike, it explains and analyzes open source licensing issues, and gives practical suggestions on how to deal with open source licensing in a business context. Including useful forms, information, and both technical and licensing background, this book will help you avoid legal pitfalls and edcuate your organization about the risks of open source.
About the Author
Heather J. Meeker is a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig, LLP, one of the largest law firms in the United States. Heather has provided open source counseling to clients ranging from technology startups using open source in product development, to public technology companies conducting open source code releases, to venture capitalists assessing new business models in the software industry. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, is a member of the American Law Institute, and in 2005, was selected by the Daily Journal as one of the top thirty intellectual property lawyers in California.
In this Book
-
Introduction—How UNIX Gave Birth to Linux, and a New Software Paradigm
-
Free Software and Open Source
-
Common Open Source Licenses and Their Structure
-
Due Diligence, License Proliferation, and Compatibility
-
Audits and Compliance Initiatives
-
Notice Requirements
-
Patents and Open Source
-
Trademarks and Open Source
-
Open Source and Open Standards
-
Developing a Corporate Open Source Policy
-
Open Source Corporate Policy
-
Open Source Code Releases
-
Open Source Trademark Policy
-
Technical Background—Operating System Kernels, User Space, and Elements of Programming
-
Enforcement of Open Source Licenses
-
The Border Dispute of GPL2
-
License or Contract?
-
Defining Distribution
-
Open Source in Mergers and Acquisitions and Other Transactions
-
GPL Version 3.0
-
LGPL Version 3.0
