If SCO Group Inc’s legal claims against Linux and IBM can be said to have achieved anything it is to have galvanized the open source community into formalizing its legal practices and commitment to supporting those that cannot afford to face potentially weighty legal bills.
Moglen has set up the Software Freedom Law Center with the assistance of open source and Linux promotion consortium Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to provide pro bono legal services to non-profit open source groups, including best practices, licensing, defense and litigation support, and legal consulting.
The Law Center is being established to provide legal services to protect the legitimate rights and interests of free and open source software projects and developers, who often do not have the means to secure the legal services they need, Moglen said in a statement.
Moglen is professor of law and legal history at Columbia Law School and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and has become the figurehead of the free and open source community’s legal initiatives.
The New York-based SFLC is being seeded with $4m raised by the OSDL, and also boasts the OSDL general counsel, Diane Peters, on its board of directors, although it will remain independent of the OSDL.
As well as Moglen and Peters, the SFLC board also includes Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, and Daniel Weitzner, director of the World Wide Web Consortium’s technology and society activities.
As well as acting as chairman of the SFLC, Moglen will also act as director-counsel and will be joined on the management staff by legal director Daniel Ravicher, who is also executive director and founder of the Public Patent Foundation, and senior counsel to the Free Software Foundation.
The SFLC expects to expand its presence to four legal attorneys later this year an is already working with the Samba team and the Free Software Foundation, most notably on revisions to the General Public License that covers Linux and many other open source projects.
Meanwhile, intellectual property management firm PatentCafe.com Inc is offering open source developers free access to its new Open Source Software Patent Search Engine to help them identify patents that have been pledged to the open source community.
The Open Source Software Patent Search Engine has been initially populated with the 500 patents IBM pledged to the open source community in January although more will be added as and when other companies follow IBM’s lead. The search engine offers natural language searching making it easier for developers to search for patents covering the concepts they are working on.
The launch of the SFLC and the release of the Open Source Software Patent Search Engine are the latest in a series of moves to improve the legal position of the open source community.
As well as providing $4m in seed funding to the SFLC, the OSDL also set up a separate $10m Linux Legal Defense Fund in 2004 to provide legal support for Linux creator Linus Torvalds and other Linux developers or users targeted by SCO.
Last month it also welcomed intellectual property software compliance vendor Black Duck Software Inc to its membership roster. Black Duck’s protexIP suite of development and license management software enables developers to ensure that their software complies with licensing and intellectual property requirements.
Another open source legal organization, Open Source Risk Management, was launched in 2004 to provide developers with insurance against intellectual property infringement claims.
