…And it was vague or unintelligible, would it still be enforceable?

Last week, ZDNet posted a news item on the Linux Foundation's upcoming Legal Summit.

Having a series of Legal Summits seems like a good idea, however, it seems as thought the events are missing the target audience that could most benefit from the information since the inaugural Summit is restricted to legal folks. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, commented in the article, 'Many of today's legal conferences unnecessarily scare or confuse open-source users, developers and vendors.'

The long-awaited 3.0 version of the GPL will be presented in draft form soon. In our world that is a major event, since it is this license (and its cousin the LGPL) that have been the cornerstone of much of the IP theory and practice in the open source world. Steve Shankland has a good summary here.

For everyone in this area, it will be important to understand the direction that the FSF is taking and comment as appropriate.

There is an interesting direction underway, as exemplified by the OSRM announcement yesterday regarding open source insurance. This article has more information, but the net is that users of open source software can now purchase insurance which will pay them for costs incurred when they are inadvertantly out of compliance with open source licensing terms. In other words, if you get a notification that you are improperly using open source code, this insurance would, among other things, pay you to take the engineering steps required to bring your usage into compliance.