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Thursday, September 13, 2007

The Linux Foundation Announces First Legal Summits.

announement taken from the

website of The Linux Foundation:

"[...] The first LF Legal Summit will be held October 25 - 26, 2007 in Boston and will only be open to Linux Foundation members and their legal counsel, which will include representation from HP, IBM, Intel, Novell and other leading open source companies. At this invitation-only Summit, members will focus on the issues of greatest common interest with regards to open standards and licensing. Presentations and working sessions will focus on building a legal defense infrastructure for Linux and evolving intellectual property rights policies optimized to support open development models.

[...]

The next LF Legal Summit will be held in Spring 2008 and will be expanded to include legal experts from all backgrounds to join LF member counsel in a collaborative learning environment. This conference will fill a glaring need for many attorneys who are looking for practical legal guidance on the development and distribution of open source software and the legal framework within which standards can be created to serve both proprietary and open source software models. This Summit is expected to be an annual LF event. [...]"

The Linux Foundation was created in 2007 by the

merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. The Linux Foundation desires to promote, protect and standardise Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. The Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator

Linus Torvalds and is supported by

leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world including, inter alia, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle.

It should be understood that the involvement of such heavyweights of ICT industries makes absolutely clear that in practice today Linux is a matter of technology, business, and business models, not of ideology. Open / Free Software is here to stay for a long time, and it would be unwise not to take it into calculation

when discussing issues of Intellectual Property law.

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