[CCID News] According to the Software Free Legal Center (SFLC) information, open source software developers have received a series of legal protection with its product components.
This legal center is founded by Professor Eben Moglen from the University of Columbia, and the center has become an authority in the field of software patents. It is worth mentioning that the center has accepted four million US dollars from the open source software development laboratory (OSDL).
This legal center provides legal services to each eligible non-profit open source software project and open source project developers, the center's purpose is to support innovative power in the open source market that has just started.
The legal services currently provided include: financial management, licenses, copyright protection, litigation support, legal advice and lawyer training. This legal center will work with the Resource Software Fund (FSF) to formulate amendment to the GNU's public license agreement.
"The continuous growth of open source software has led to such a situation: such as IBM, HP and other companies proposed legal protection, while small businesses or independent developers are unable to pay these protection needs", IDC analysis company analyst Dan Kusnetzky "Many developers do not have professional knowledge related to complex technology related to software development, nor does it understand the development-related copyright laws and license agreements."
To help open source communities out of this embarrassment, this legal center will help independent developers to decide the type of license protocol currently available and guide them to use such license agreements. The center also helps reduce the chaos of the license, so developers can determine those could not do those in the source code of the software.
Analysts pointed out that the current Open source has reached a 5 billion dollar market size, and large IT companies will be forced to protect their intellectual property. "Legal Advice can give independent developers and small open source software providers to the legal risks they face and the laws or license agreements that can be used.
Such a legal center is not unique. Last year OSDL cost $ 10 million, the Linux Legal Protection Fund is a series of Linus Torvalds for Linux operating systems and provides legal support with the series of Linux related companies involved in the SCO prosecution.
