Heading to New York?

Posted on July 22, 2008 by jasonhaislmaier

I will be in New York on August 8th to speak on a panel at this year’s American Bar Association (ABA) Annual Meeting. The panel, titled “Life after GPLv3: New Developments in Open Source Software Licensing” is sponsored by the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law and is being held at 2:00 PM on the 8th at the Waldorf-Astoria.

We have structured the panel as a series of brief presentations by the panelists followed by a general Q&A session on the presentations. While the title for the panel is a bit innocuous, the presentations will cover a variety of relevant open source topics, including: GPLv3 and the GPLv3 drafting process (including differences between GPLv2, GPLv3 and other open source licenses), open source patent concerns, legal strategies for using open source software in connection with proprietary software, and issues raised by open source software under the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 and other corporate regulations.

My presentation will include a brief history and update on the “BusyBox lawsuits” brought over the last year by The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of its clients Erik Andersen and Rob Landley (the two principal developers of the BusyBox open source utility) alleging copyright infringement based on a violation of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). I will be including information based both on my personal experience working with defendants in several of the BusyBox cases as well as discussions with others involved in the suits. Details on the panel and the other panelists are included below.

For those of you based in New York or headed to the ABA Annual Meeting, please let me know if you would be interested in getting together while I am in town.

2008 ABA Annual Meeting
Section of Intellectual Property Law

2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
CLE Program: Life after GPLv3: New Developments in Open Source Software Licensing.
co-sponsored by the Section of Science & Technology Law

The past year has seen significant legal developments concerning open source software licensing, most notably, the publication of the GPLv3 license, which is much more comprehensive than GPLv2 and attempts to address the changes in software law over the past 15 years, as well as initial efforts to enforce open source software license requirements in the courts. This panel will explore the new GPLv3 license, how it differs from GPLv2, the status of GPLv3 adoption and recent litigation concerning the enforcement of GPL and other open source license terms affecting GPLv3 or other open source license use.

Moderator
Sue Ross, Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., New York, NY

Speakers
Gabe Holloway, Leonard, Street and Deinard, Minneapolis, MN
Terry Ilardi, IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY
Jason Haislmaier, Holme Roberts & Owen LLP, Boulder, CO
Jim Markwith, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, CA