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Report from SDForum Open Source SIG Oct 2004 meeting

I attended SDForum’s Open Source SIG monthly meeting “Facts and Fallacies of Open Source Licensing” with Larry Rosen, counsel for OSI (chief licensing gatekeeper for open source) and Steve Mutkowski, corporate counsel for Microsoft in charge of advising on internal use of open source (in tools, embedded, code snippets, running on servers, etc). This meeting attracted mainstream attendees, far different than many open source events. Among the attendees were lawyers from most of the Valley’s big firms and corporate counsel for companies like Cadence. People were very interested in how they could use open source in their businesses, and where specifically the GPL/LGP would present problems. As such, there were a lot of basic questions, which showed that awareness of open source has penetrated to new groups that are just learning about the issues. That is the most significant data point I absorbed from the meeting.