Free software's white knight
Published: 15 Mar 2006 13:20 GMT
Q: Last year, you helped launch the Software Freedom Law Center, which offers free legal advice to free software projects. How many projects are you working with?
A: There are more takers than we can supply, so we have had to figure out how to best use the resources at our disposal. This involves triage — allocating our services to those who need it most.
There are five lawyers in this firm and we have about a dozen major clients. That's about the client load I expect us to carry for the next six months or so. There are perhaps another half dozen people seeking our help who might become clients in the future, and there are also a similar number of people who need much less from us than our major clients do.
We also carry out activities that are of benefit to the broad community of developers. For example, this week we released a position paper about the situation regarding GPL violations in relation to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
What sort of help do you provide to free software projects? Who are your main clients?
One aspect is the representation of free software projects that are in wide commercial use so need to be particularly sure about their legal situation. Another has to do with projects that need organisational help — tax questions or whatever.
The Free Software Foundation and the GPL revision process are consuming a great deal of time in the firm at the moment. In the next couple of weeks, there's going to be time spent on the One Laptop per Child project. We also have some work outstanding for the Apache Software Foundation and do work for Wine, Samba and OpenOffice.org.
What is the Law Center's involvement in the GPL 3 revision process?
At present, I would characterise our effort this way: the Free Software Foundation, which is the author of the licence, is primarily responsible for the licence comment process. As the FSF's legal counsel we are responsible for the management of legal questions. For that reason the Center is involved in the discussion and drafting of the licence — Richard and I are working together on it.
The first public discussion draft of GPL 3 was released in January. When will the second discussion draft be available? Can you give any idea of the changes that will be included in the second version?
We will probably have a pause for redrafting in May and will be done with another discussion draft in mid-June.
I would say that the likeliest places for changes are places where there are lots of suggestions and discussion. I'm not surprised by what people are discussing, but these areas may not turn out to be the most important. A lot of changes have been proposed and if these are good, we'll take them.
We're learning too, so there may be changes in the next draft that have not been demanded or encouraged by people, but just resulted from our having thought more about it.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of its development kernel, has already said he won't convert the operating system to GPL 3. What do you think about this?
For me to comment on what licence someone should use would be...
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