J! and beyond distribution licensing
Do you remember having a laugh when Marcos posted "How to prevent community"? Point 6 of the keynote of Josh Berkus at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was about legalese, and for me it was a bit too close for comfort. I have noticed that many people in the software industry are a little bit afraid of legal aspects, in the same way that many people who are not in IT are a bit scared of computers. Most people here would agree that there is no need to be fearful of IT, and in the same way I do not see any reason for developers to fear law.
Meanwhile, I had offered to do a presentation at J! and Beyond, since the idea was that everybody would pitch in. The original plan was to do an outline overview of all legal aspects of Joomla, but when I saw Josh Berkus' keynote I changed my plan.
So, at JAB I did a presentation in response to that #6, and I called it "Joomla! beyond distribution licensing: legal tools for a collaborative community".
Using three examples, I explained that legal aspects do not always need to be a hindrance for collaborative open source software communities, and in fact can be seen as one of the tools in the community manager's toolbox. The three examples I used are contribution agreements, trademark licensing and rules of conduct. Of course I used Joomla in these three examples, but the same thinking can be applied to the communities around Joomla extensions or to other open source projects.
Doing a presentation like this at an event focused on software was obviously a bit of an experiment, but it was a nice surprise to see that the room was well filled and that nobody started fretting or yawning in the time it took to present my slides. Unfortunately the presentation was not covered by a camera, and since I made it on Prezi it seems impossible to upload it to the JAB slide share collection. So I thought I'd share it with you here.
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Comment by Robert Vining on June 6, 2010 at 12:02pm -
Nice work Ewout. Thanks for sharing this here. I'm in the middle of cooking a late breakfast, so will hold my thoughts for a later time.
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Comment by Ewout Wierda on June 6, 2010 at 2:12pm -
Bon apetit! :)
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Comment by ruud van zuidam on June 6, 2010 at 3:05pm -
Having missed it at jab thanks for getting a second change ;-))
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