By Lawrence Rosen, Prentice Hall, July 2004

A Complete Guide to the Law of Open Source for Developers, Managers, and Lawyers

Now that open source software is blossoming around the world, it is crucial to understand how open source licenses work—and their solid legal foundations. Open Source Initiative general counsel Lawrence Rosen presents a plain-English guide to open source law for developers, managers, users, and lawyers. Rosen clearly explains the intellectual property laws that support open source licensing, carefully reviews today’s leading licenses, and helps you make the best choices for your project or organization. 

Lawrence Rosen is an attorney specializing in technology and a computer professional who has taught programming and managed several computer departments at Stanford University. He is currently general counsel and secretary of Open Source Initiative (OSI), formerly served as its executive director, and has written several major open source licenses.

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The Book Official WebPage, FREE

Book Contents (PDFs):

• Front matter 

• Preamble

• Chapter 1: Freedom and Open Source

• Chapter 2: Intellectual Property

• Chapter 3: Distribution of Software

• Chapter 4: Taxonomy of Licenses

• Chapter 5: Academic Licenses

• Chapter 6: Reciprocity and the GPL

• Chapter 7: The Mozilla Public License (MPL)

• Chapter 8: The Common Public License (CPL)

• Chapter 9: The OSL and the AFL

• Chapter 10: Choosing an Open Source License

• Chapter 11: Shared Source, Eventual Source, and Other Licensing Models

• Chapter 12: Open Source Litigation

• Chapter 13: Open Standards

• The Open Source Paradigm

• Appendices

Coverage Includes:

• Explanation of why the SCO litigation and other attacks won’t derail open source
• Dispelling the myths of open source licensing
• Intellectual property law for nonlawyers: ownership and licensing of copyrights, patents, and trademarks
• “Academic licenses”: BSD, MIT, Apache, and beyond
• The “reciprocal bargain” at the heart of the GPL
• Alternative licenses: Mozilla, CPL, OSL and AFL
• Benefits of open source, and the obligations and risks facing businesses that deploy open source software
• Choosing the right license: considering business models, product architecture, IP ownership,

  license compatibility issues, relicensing, and more

• Enforcing the terms and conditions of open source licenses
• Shared source, eventual source, and other alternative models to open source
• Protecting yourself against lawsuits

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