Slashdot Mirror
New Legal Center for Open Source Projects
NW writes "According to a News.com story well known OSS lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen are launching a new "Software Freedom Legal Center" to assist open source developers with legal issues for free." You can view the website at Softwarefreedom.org.
Well, I doubt it is with all free intentions. Lawyers are required to do a certain amount of probono work a year, maybe this is their segment of it? Granted it is a great idea and will help many people, I doubt they have the resources to fight lengthly big battles for OSS.
but a little legal help is better than none.
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman is working to update the General Public License (GPL) that governs Linux and hundreds of other open-source projects. The law center said it will help with that work.
A crucial task, in my opinion. More specifially, Stallman and co. are planning to protect GPL code better legally from the threat of patent litigation. Software patents are a relatively recent, and (in the opinion of many, including myself) harmful phenomenon. Updating the GPL to somehow lessen their potential impact on Free Software would be a major accomplishment.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Is having Lessig on board a good thing? Has he ever won a case? I stopped following his blog after he started to wig-out over the 2004 election. And I find his message harder to relate to. Stallman, etc. are focused on *creating* new Free Software, not trying to get free access to previously copyrighted work (which seems to be the message of Lessig's two latest books). That's a much harder flag to rally around IMHO. (Yeah, I'm well aware of CC). He also seems to be to much of a do-gooder. What's the point of having a lawyer if he's not going to draw from the lawyer's little bag of dirty tricks? (There's a reason people don't like lawyers.)