Services

The SFLC provides legal services to the Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) community in five primary areas:

• Asset Stewardship
• Licensing
• License Defense and Litigation Support
• Non-profit Corporate Assistance
• Legal Consulting and Lawyer Training

Asset Stewardship

To ensure success, individual FOSS projects need more than a well-chosen license. The processes by which FOSS is produced must ensure that the rights of the FOSS community are preserved and promoted and avoid third-party intellectual property claims, which – as the SCO controversy has shown – have striking potential to disrupt enterprise adoption of FOSS. By bringing to bear the world’s leading expertise in the area, the SFLC offers a broad range of assistance for FOSS developers, ranging from disseminating general best practices guidance to crafting custom solutions for individual clients. This assistance establishes sound organizational and legal structures so that FOSS projects can be assembled and distributed in a way that protects the public’s right to access, use, and develop the software. The SFLC directly represents many of the most significant existing FOSS conservancies, and provides formation assistance for new projects seeking to create similar conservancies.

Licensing

The SFLC is directly involved in its clients’ FOSS license development efforts, including development of the GNU General Public License v3 by the Free Software Foundation, and offers licensing assistance, particularly license development and implementation consulting, to FOSS developers other than its clients. The SFLC also does community-wide licensing review and licensing analysis, for the purpose of identifying and addressing the causes of unnecessary FOSS license proliferation.

License Defense and Litigation Support

The SFLC defends the integrity of FOSS licenses against both adverse judicial interpretation and legislative interference. The SFLC accepts primary responsibility for enforcement of US copyrights on the software of the represented asset stewardships, and coordinates international copyright enforcement efforts for such works as necessary. The SFLC also assists clients and the general FOSS community in resolution of disputes relating to the use and development of FOSS.

Non-profit Corporate Assistance

The SFLC helps FOSS projects develop and maintain legal status to help ensure their longevity. The SFLC assists its clients with all stages of corporate existence, including formation and tax exemption, and helps projects with their contracts and governance. The SFLC established and continues to serve as counsel to the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides an alternative to independent corporate formation for FOSS projects. The SFLC is also able to represent its clients in negotiations.

Legal Consulting and Lawyer Training

The SFLC provides enhanced long-term legal stability to the FOSS community by offering consulting to the public and training to attorneys involved with or interested in FOSS legal issues.

The SFLC gives seminars and makes public presentations from time to time on topics relating to FOSS software legal issues. The SFLC also welcomes requests for it to make presentations or give seminars on specific topics of interest. In the past, the SFLC has given presentations ranging from "An introduction to Free and Open Source Software Legal Issues" to "Patents and Free and Open Source Software" to "Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3)" to many other topics relating to FOSS.

If you would like to learn more about having the SFLC present to your group, please contact us.