Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects

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Book: A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects. Software Freedom Law Center, 2008.

URL = http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html


Description

"Our intended audience for this Primer is any person interested in a basic understanding of the legal issues that impact FOSS development and distribution. In particular, this Primer, like most of our other public work at SFLC, is addressed to two constituencies. First, we provide creative, productive hackers insight on how to interact with the legal system—insofar as it affects the projects they work on—with a minimum of cost, fuss and risk. Second, we present a starting point for lawyers and risk managers for thinking about the particular, at times counter-intuitive, logic of software freedom. While these are the primary audiences we intend to reach, we hope others will benefit from this Primer as well, and we have purposefully given it a non-lawyer style of communication (for example, by intentionally omitting dense citation of judicial or other legal authority that is the hallmark of lawyers writing for lawyers)."