The Software Freedom Law Show

Episode 0x1E: Fontana Redux

5 January 2010

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Summary

Karen and Bradley interview this show's first-ever second-time guest, Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat.

This show was released on Tuesday 5 January 2010; its running time is 00:49:44.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:29)

Bradley and Karen introduce the guest, Richard Fontana.

Segment 1 (00:58)

• Richard Fontana, who is an Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat. Richard Fontana is an Open Source Licensing and Paten Counsel at Red Hat. (01:44)
• Our discussions with Fontana stemmed from his OSCON 2009 talk, Improving Legal Certainty in FOSS: Best Practices for Upstream Projects. He provided his slides from that talk to us and our listeners. The are Copyright © 2009, Red Hat. Inc., licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 USA license. (01:50)
• Fontana and Bradley discussed at length the “folk wisdom” about LGPLv2 that differs from the letter of the terms, and how it compares to LGPLv3. Specifically, the text in LGPLv2§3 that reads:

  To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License.

  (13:19, 15:24)
• Fontana compared the legal interpretation and practices around Free Software to the medieval “lex mercatoria” (18:56)
• Fontana pointed out that the lex mercatoria is, in some ways, the basis of the Uniform Commercial Code. (19:50)
• Fontana referenced one of the early GPL enforcement efforts regarding the Objective C front end to GCC (23:03)
• Bradley referenced the debian-legal debate regarding the AGPLv3. (31:20)
• Fontana mentioned that the Fedora licensing policies require that licenses meet the FSF's Free Software Definition (32:39)
• Bradley discussed that developers tend to dislike CC-0 due to its complexity because they prefer simpler (although perhaps less effective) public domain dedications. (40:38)

Segment 2 (44:19)

• Karen points out that license interpretation is often an exercise in risk analysis. (45:02)

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Tags: bkuhn, karen, fontana, red hat, copyrights, gpl

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