Open Source Software

Project management
Legal aspects
Administration

Open source software is increasingly becoming a cornerstone for embedded development project. At first it was greeted a free software but incorporation in volume products puts new requirements on the whole organization. We will look into the legal aspects and administration of managing projects based on open source software.

Presentations will be made by:

Jason Wacha. Vice President of Corporate Affairs & General Counsel
MontaVista Software, Inc.

“Open Source Legal 101:  A crash-course for non-lawyers working with free and open source software”

In their eagerness leverage the open source development model, developers sometimes forget that “software is software”:  free/open source software is still subject to copyright law, and is still subject to the terms and conditions of license agreements.  This presentation will give developers the context to understand how open source licensing can affect project outcomes. Topics covered will include the differences between laws vs. licenses vs. commercial agreements; what is a derivative work; package/RPM licenses vs. program licenses; how GPL and commercial software work together; and practical suggestions for dealing with related issues.

Recognized by the San Francisco Daily Journal as “one of the country’s preeminent experts on open source software licensing,” and named as a Northern California Super Lawyer®, Jason supervises MontaVista Software’s worldwide legal and corporate policies and practices, and develops and implements the company’s intellectual property strategy.  Jason began his career at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where ultimately he helped run a practice group. Jason has spoken at or chaired more than 50 conferences and events nationally and internationally, and has published multiple articles on open source licensing and the GPL.  Jason has been quoted in journals worldwide, and his work has twice been cited as authority by United States Federal Circuit Courts.  Jason also regularly lectures at law schools on both technology licensing and international business transactions.  He is a founder of Open Bar, a not-for-profit organization founded to educate legal professionals regarding open source/free software. Jason has a J.D. from the University of California, Davis, where he was an editor of the U.C. Davis Law Review, and has degrees in both economics and English from Stanford University.

Olavi Kumpulainen Prevas

“A walk-through of the most popular licenses in the open source world and an example of how closed source can co-exist with GPL in an embedded device.”

Every product that includes company IPR's mixed with open source software runs a serious risk of running into legal disputes if the software licenses aren't properly met. A legal dispute may be dealt with in several ways; Process and win, process and lose or settle it - Or one may avoid it!

This presentation gives an introduction to the latter approach, how to avoid the dispute by designing the system in a "license-safe" way in the first place.

We will take an in-depth look at some of the most popular open source licenses such as; Apache, MIT, BSD and (L)GPL - where they are used and what implications they may have on company IPR's. The presentation also includes a case study of Android, the mobile phone platform that aims to give an example of how a platform may be designed so that open source code can co-exist with an environment that contains closed source.

Olavi Kumpulainen is a gifted programmer with a genuine passion for software development. He is chairman for Prevas Technology Council, which aims to ensure that all Prevas projects have the best balance between new and existing technology. In his role as Chief Architect at Prevas Stockholm he is responsible for making system designs that meet high requirements and ensure a predictable development phase. 

Before joining Prevas, Olavi was a System Architect of IPUnplugged, a company he co-founded. Since the mid 80s he has been working with embedded systems for companies like General Electric Medical Systems and Ericsson. He has held highly technical roles such as System Architect, Senior Programmer, and Technical Manager.

Olavi’s experience of the open source world stems from his first installation of a Linux distribution back in 1993; since then he has continued to use and develop software for Linux and different flavors of BSD in numerous projects, as a consequence of this he has frequently resolved licensing issues in products by designing them properly.