The Law, Policy and Government track is an expansive one. This track will offer sessions on legal aspects of good governance, organisational management of open source software and considers policy and how Government might implement laws and policies in open source software.
As open source software adoption has become the norm across society and organisational use, contribution and distribution of open source software becomes mainstream, we have seen its users and how they “Curate” the code they become critical to its success. This Curation – an as yet undefined term generally accepted to mean the good legal governance and technical hygiene of open source software usage – requires end users to understand law and governance in this space. Frequently we hear that there is not enough discussion, knowledge or information on this.
The focus of this room in our first year is intentionally broad. It will consider the issues relevant to the maturation of open source software users and the journey that they take from initial users to contributors and distributors as identified in Open UK’s State of Open Reports, and user journeys and case studies will be welcome.
The legal issues for projects and communities, public sector, not for profits and enterprises are all worthy topics for this room.
Whether this includes legal guidance and debate on legal topics, or considerations for open source program offices or community governance, all are relevant to this bigger picture. Informative Sessions might focus on a particular issue such as licensing or building an open source program office or commercial agreements and open source software licensing. We also welcome consideration of the impact of areas of technology on open source or open source on these areas, such as licensing, governance and compliance issues in containers or AI or a sector such as mobile networks and the interaction open source and FRAND licensing in that sector.
Our CEO’s recent publication Open Source Law Policy and Practice which brought 26 domain expert authors across this field together, in a single publication, covers many of the relevant topics and may offer guidance on the kinds of topics being sought for discussion.
Alongside these legal and governance areas sit the evolving area of open source software policy and Government.
Much of our historic open source software policy has related to IP. Recent policy has focused on Security which will be discussed along with technical matters in that track. Today, and tomorrow the relevant areas for open source software policy are bigger than security or any one country’s policies. The curation and future of open source software funding, or how the world can better support open source software maintainers would fit well into these policy topics.
