Sharing legal knowledge and understanding about Open Source licences

EOLE 2023 - Legal Exploration and discussion
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1

The main objective of this discussion is to understand how can we share legal knowledge with different communities and share elements about Open Source licenses. Feel free to add your ideas, opinions, experience, on elements added in this post my answering this topic.

Here are the first element mentioned during workshops :

  • Designing a list of interpretations of each licences with legal & scientific ground,
  • Legal repositories with (anonymous ?) legal content produced all around the world,
  • Get the inspiration from other projects using wikipedia/Zenodo or similar project in order to share case law (and main legal scientific articles regarding these cases),
  • Publish Open Source glossary,
  • Share concrete uses cases of open source compliance approach by organisations and the problems they encountered.

Further notice

  • Create a collaborative FAQ on open source compliance issues and about main use cases (on a gitlab/github project),
  • Collecting all use cases and different ways Open Source licences are interpreting all around the world,
  • List all common / open and publicly available resources, suggesting their maintainers a way to work together,
  • Creating a repository of all existing databases and articulate/converge as possible (link to the feed with all the example),
  • Encouraging a participatory research-action approach in law to deal with the challenges of Open Source,
  • Explaining why legal and compliance approaches are different and complimentary in Open Source Policies.
2

During the second workshop, a number of elements were discussed that could be added to the list :

Share concrete material

  • Share learning materials for researchers,
  • Create common repositories for compliance checked components,
  • Launch a dialogue with intellectual property experts and jointly develop a process.
  • Share existing documents such as policies, processes, templates and sBOMS,
  • Specify compliance as a research goal and share the results,
  • Create a process (with Open Source tools) of software documentation that will allow automatic compliance checking,
  • Develop standards and share tools : edit guidelines for researchers with lists of permissive licences and copyleft licences in order to know what to do,
  • Provide access to guidelines and checklists.

How could it be shared ?

  • Through documentation and awareness,
  • Sharing in a version control system,
  • Share a minimal protocol to do compliance : what are the steps we go through ? What is sufficient compliance ? Are they tools to automatise it ?
  • Intellectual property experts are stakeholders for the process.