While much of the open source community was in San Francisco last week at the LinuxWorld Expo , I was in New York at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association (ABA) speaking at the “Life after GPLv3: New Developments in Open Source Software Licensing” event organized by the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law. My presentation covered an update on the lawsuits filed over the past 12 months by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of their clients Erik Andersen and Rob Landley (the two principal developers of the BusyBox open source utility) against Monsoon Multimedia, Xterasys Corporation, High-Gain Antennas, Verizon Communications, Bell Microproducts, Inc., Super Micro Computer, Inc. and Extreme Networks alleging copyright infringement based on a violation of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in connection with BusyBox. In addition to discussing the history and resolution of the BusyBox cases (including my involvement with several of the cases), I also highlighted the similarities and differences between these cases and past open source software license enforcement efforts outside of the courts by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org. The presentation materials are now available online. I understand that the ABA will be posting the materials from the other presenters at the event, as well as a podcast of the entire event, on the ABA website in the coming weeks.
Many thanks to Mark Wittow and Gloria Archuleta, co-charis of ABA IP Section for organizing the event and inviting me to speak. Thanks also to my co-presenters Terry Ilardi of IBM Corporation, Jim Markwith of Microsoft Corporation, and Gabe Holloway of Leonard, Street and Deinard, as well as the moderator of the panel discussion portion of the event, Sue Ross of Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.
