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Free eBook on Open Source Licensing by by Lawrence Rosen

by Fouad Bajwa

I really like all these people who love to contribute their knowledge and time towards educating people about FOSS and Linux specially keeping the end-users safe both legally and through extending appropriate guidance on the use of legal software. Such a successful attempt has been made by Lawrence Rosen in the  publication titled, “Open Source Licensing - Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law“.

The book was originally published by Prentice Hall in 2004 and carries a foreward by the famous Lawyer and Digital Commons Guru Lawrence Lessig, Co-founder of Creative Commons. “Some argue that licenses that support open source projects are ‘dangerous.’ In this beautifully clear work, Lawrence Rosen defuses this argument. And in a talent rare for a lawyer, Rosen succeeds in making these points about the law meaningful and understandable to anyone at all.? - Lawrence Lessig.

Rosen is the General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative and has produced a very detailed guide to the law of open source for developers, managers, and lawyers. With the booming of FOSS and Linux in all industries worldwide, it is crucial for all stakeholders to understand how FOSS IPR and Copyrights work and their solid legal foundations. The book presents a detailed analysis of IPR Laws supporting FOSS. The book (from flyer) discusses the following topics:

  • Explanation of why the SCO litigation and other attacks won’t derail open source
  • Dispelling the myths of open source licensing
  • Intellectual property law for non-lawyers: ownership and licensing of
  • copyrights, patents and trademarks
  • “Academic licenses?: BSD, MIT, Apache, and beyond The “reciprocal bargain? at the heart of the GPL
  • Alternative licenses: Mozilla, CPL, OSL and AFL
  • Benefits of open source, and the obligations and risks facing businesses
  • that deploy open source software
  • Choosing the right license: considering business models, product architecture,
  • IP ownership, license compatibility issues, relicensing, and more
  • Enforcing the terms and conditions of open source licenses
  • Shared source, eventual source, and other alternative models to open source
  • Protecting yourself against lawsuits

You may read the book online for free here but if you really really like, I would recommend you to buy it and support the author to produce more publications on similar topics and that way, you too can continue to support the FOSS Movement.

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Posted in Book Reviews on December 14th, 2006

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