 Good afternoon, everybody. We're going to start our session. I'd like to introduce Deb Nicholson. Deb has an incredibly unique background where she combines both her interest in technology and social justice. She's been a free speech advocate, economic justice organizer, and civil liberties defender. But, surprisingly, she's also been involved with Massachusetts politics for 15 years and then became involved with the free software movement. She's a community outreach director at the Open Invention Network and the community manager at Media Goblin. And she's also serving on the board of Open Hatch, which is a nonprofit dedicated to matching perspective free software contributors with communities and tools and education. Please help me do welcome Deb. Thanks. All right. So I'm going to talk about how to use more free and open source software at work, in particular how to approach the legal department. So how many of you are using some free software at work? How about 100% free software at work? Okay. There could always be more, right? So this is... You know that sometimes when you go upstairs and you're like, we should be doing this. They imagine this is what's going on in IT. And so we're going to give you... I'm going to talk about some of the ways you can figure out where the lawyers and management is coming from so that you can answer their concerns and hopefully win them over to more free software at your workplace. So this is just kind of like what I'm going to go through. What are some of the great arguments for using more free software at work? How lawyers and coders are different? There's lots and lots of ways. We'll focus on the important ones. And then a little bit of patents and copyrights, which are some of the things that lawyers tend to worry about when you say, oh, I want to use this thing I found on the Internet. And then a little bit of a patent tour of what's out there for the particular legal issues. And then we'll finish with some strategies and resources. So why is free and open-source software good for your workplace? Of course, most of you who've been here all weekend probably know that not having to write stuff from scratch is pretty great. It's a time-saver. And, you know, being able to change things when you want to change them is also pretty great. But communal debugging. I don't know if people can see these slides because it will be fluorescent, but they're all pretty much all going to be monkeys, just so you know. So the communal debugging makes for better code. It makes it more robust code. Hopefully it makes some of the security vulnerabilities shallower. Of course, people have to be looking at it. But, you know, for projects that have a lot of people looking at them and working on them, the communal debugging is a huge help, as opposed to having like one person in your organization spend like five minutes a week looking at something. So trust and transparency. This is pretty big. If you are in any kind of an industry where you would like for your customers to trust you at all, maybe with their safety or anything important, having the ability to say like, oh, you can always look at our source code and see what we're up to. Or we're actually never going to do that crappy vendor lock-in thing that other databases might do. It makes it easier to sell to folks like, hey, try this for a year, and then if you don't, we won't be holding all of your data hostage. You can actually just move on. And you might decide you like us in that year. So trust and transparency is a great selling point for businesses, but also if your workplace is a school or a government agency or anything like that where you feel like you have a responsibility to your constituency to be transparent and open, free software is an obvious choice there too. So more capacity. So for large projects like OpenStack, are people familiar with OpenStack kind of? Okay. So OpenStack is a huge Linux-based cloud. That's like a very, very top level, but it's a huge, huge project, and it's worked on by a lot of different companies. Each of those individual companies, if they were to work on it themselves, would have to hire lots more people just to work on that one thing. So instead you have like a handful of people working in HP, a handful of people working in Red Hat, a handful of people working at a couple other companies, and they are able to make this much bigger project that everyone can share in. The other thing that's great about that is that they're not even all using it for the exact same things. So something that you're not doing with your business today is something that one of your partners in an open-source project might already be doing. So you might think like, oh, one day we're going to have to translate everything into Russian. But maybe by the time you get there, one of your partners has already done it, and you're like, oh, sweet. So this enables you to do more. These grand shared projects give you more capacity. So you don't have to hire one of everyone in every single company. So this is one of those things where you want to say to your boss, maybe like, oh, yeah, those things are all great. And we all know that freedom of thinking means a better world and happier employers, but your company is still trying to run a business. So when you're talking to your boss, depending on who your boss is, about using more free and open-source software at your workplace, you want to lead with some of the amazing business ROI value ads as opposed to the, you know, freedom man kind of things because at the end of the day, they still have to write paychecks and expect them to not bounce. So that's sort of a little bit of the acculturation. So there might be other talks where we can talk about the freedom and the, you know, if the idea of a proprietary singularity keeps you up at night and stuff like that. But this is probably not good things to bring into your manager or to your legal team. Maybe over beer some other day, right? So, co-workers and lawyers, they are not the same, right? So when we say free, they're thinking, oh, has anyone ever had like a roommate bring a piece of furniture in off the sidewalk? Yeah. Okay. So I have one of those roommates who is like, it was free. I'm like, oh, sweet. And then like three days later, I realized we had some little fleas in our house. And I was like, I think, I don't think this was free. This is definitely not flee-free. So we had to wash every piece of fabric in the entire house, coat our old hardwood floors with like a hyper solution of borax to dry out all the eggs. The cat was very, very, very unhappy for a long time. So when you tell lawyers like, it's free. I found it on the internet. This is what they're hearing, right? So you want to figure out how you can allay those fears. Because just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. So, you know, there are legal ramifications for using code that if you're not aware of them, they can still trip you up. So just keeping your eyes set is no good. In particular, and I'm going to go into more detail a little bit later on, the pattern landscape is like a cartoon of a million banana peels. So this is another thing that when you say like, oh, I found it on the internet. And they're like, yeah. People always ask me like, do you know if the software that I'm writing is infringing on patents? And I say, yes. And they're like, wait, I didn't finish. I didn't tell you what kind of software I'm writing or what it does. But the answer is already yes. You're writing software. It is almost certainly infringing on patents. And lawyers know this too. So they tend to be a little bit more cautious. So in our line of work, like if you do something creative, you do outreach or you write code or those types of things, permission versus forgiveness. Like if you want to stay up all pretty late and break things or clean out the work fridge without telling anyone or any number of other things where you're like, oh, I broke it. Maybe you sandboxed it before you broke it. Maybe you didn't. This tends to eventually be okay for code. It's not okay for legal issues. And so that's kind of the different direction. It's like, oh, well, we'll just try it and then we'll work it out. It could be a very expensive mistake to screw up on legal issues. So lawyers as a group and there may be exceptions tend to have extreme caution as their default setting. Lawyers never get fired for saying no. So that is like their first answer is going to always be no or like could you not. And that's, it's just sort of the way that they are. So you go to them, you ask permission to do something. They say yes, and something happens. Then they go back to the lawyer and they're like, you told us we could do this. They never want to be in that position. So you, when you, when you, when you approach lawyers with something that has some inherent risk or has some potential risk, you need to be aware of that setting. That said, understanding the world of patents and copyrights and understanding where there's a reasonable amount of risk and where there's an unreasonable amount of risk is going to help you out. So this is, we're going to go into a little bit of how patents and copyrights work with FOSTS. The great news is, is that we're, we're not doing new uncharted territory here. The free software has been around for 30 years. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of companies and projects that have employees and everything using free software. So we're not, we're not going off into uncharted territory here. If it was an actual physical space, it would actually be a little crowded these days. Fortunately, it's a virtual space, so you don't have to worry about people blocking your view of the water. So, so first off, all software licenses rest on top of copyright. Do you have lawyers in the room? I'm just curious. No, okay, lawyer-free zone. So this is, I am not a lawyer and this is, of course, not legal advice, but also this is, this is sort of quick and dirty, not, not legal advice. But all free software licenses rest on top of default copyright. Copyright is the all rights reserved. It's, it's invoked as soon as you write something unless you say otherwise. So it's intended to protect people who have written something. That's, so because we talk about writing code is how we sort of ended up expanding the idea of copyright to software code because it is a written thing. But copyright also covers books, it covers sheet music, it covers maps, and a number of other things that you would write. Plays, musical scores, that type of thing. So in order to use a free software license, you must first invoke default copyright. All of the free software licenses are additional permissions and sometimes responsibilities on top of default copyright. Most notably, copy left. So then the question people always want to ask is, what license should we choose? Of course that depends on what you're doing, but these are some of the popular ones that are more well known and better understood and have a lot of other projects using them and can be compatible with a lot of the other code that's out there. So if you go to GitHub and you're looking at, you're going to find probably not AGPL so often, but the rest of these you'll find a lot of code under there. So Apache and FreeBSD are what you would call permissives. They don't, it's like do whatever you like with the code. Don't sue us for patent infringement is the additional responsibility in the Apache, current version of the Apache license. And then FreeBSD doesn't have any other additional permissions. Some versions actually say that you have to attribute us, but that's pretty small, it just means in the code and it's usually part of the license. TPL3 and TPL2, I didn't want to overload you guys with logos, but are both what we call copy left. So those are, you can do whatever you like with the code, but if you create a modified, some of my code plus some of your code and then put it out into the world, you have to provide source. And you often hear like, oh, well you can't make any money with a copy left license, but I know GitHub just hired like three more people, so they seem to be doing okay. And Red Hat from all accounts is doing okay. I think we're up against like two, maybe four of their employees on this slot alone. So you can base a business on copy left code, but you need to understand what kind of a business you're going to run. And then the LGPL and the AGPL are variations of the GPL. The LGPL is sort of a relaxed idea of like what can be linked to GPL code, and then the AGPL is sort of an enhanced version of what can be linked. People often call it GPL for the web. So those are all of the different licenses. So if you're talking to a lawyer who knows nothing at all about free software licenses, you're going to want to get them to understand that there's a pretty wide spectrum of free software licenses. So some of the things they may have heard is like, oh, they're all this or they're all that or they were written by hippies. That might be true. But depending on which license we're talking about, what they have heard may not actually line up with the license you're asking them for permission to use. So that's important to keep in mind, and I'm going to share some links and resources at the end where they can go and educate themselves. And you too. So what is your business model? It depends a lot on like which thing you're actually trying to make money on. If you're selling phones, it may not matter at all what kind of license is on the software. Because you're making your money off the hardware. If you're selling services that just happen to include some amount of software, it also may not matter at all what kind of license is on your software. So you want to understand what your business model is. If you're in a startup situation and you have a lawyer, and please don't tell me you're going to wait a couple years until you get a lawyer, because it's a terrible idea. But if you're in a startup situation and you're starting to talk to a lawyer about your business model, you want to include them in that conversation from the beginning, because the license that you choose has a direct impact on the way it works with your business model. So let's take a look at two different companies. I assume you guys have heard of these folks, right? And actually both of these use a lot of GPL2 code. So Red Hat, they do sell service and expertise, but that's not their main thing. What they've done is they've built a huge platform that people use and really like to use. And they have a community that helps build that platform. And what they sell is I'm going to figure out which iteration of that platform makes the most sense for your infrastructure and your business and what you're doing. And I'm going to make sure that we made the nicest user interfaces, have done all the quality assurance, and have made sure that you're not getting like an old, weird buggy version of whatever it is that you might get from, you know, the open internet. So what they do is they do a lot of work to clean up the, you know, big pile of available platform code out there and then sell you the proper slice of it for what you're doing. So for them, if you can have access to all the code, that's fine. It's the combination of the code that they offer that is what they're monetizing. So that's a really different business model than hardware or just selling a service. So that means that they, they're like, yeah, copy left, bring it on. Community, like they cannot with all the code. We don't care. It works out great for them. And like I said, I think they're doing okay. Twitter has a different business model. They are a web service, of course. So, you know, they make some money on promoted tweets, which is sort of a fancy type of advertising and I'm sure they aggregate some data. One of the things that is really important for them as far as getting people to promote the use of their site is they have an open API. So it's this grand social experiment that they happen to be providing the infrastructure for, but they're not doing all of the research and nuts and bolts stuff on it. They're opening the API so that other people can. And then, of course, they're also like, if you're writing an academic paper on Twitter, it's, you cannot buy that kind of advertising. They're basically like, here, use all of our information and then just, you know, you're going to have to say you got it from Twitter because there is no other micro blog that has that volume of data. So for them, you know, I think, I mean, I don't want to make them sound too Machiavellian, but I think that's a huge part of it of making the API open is that they have people talking about and thinking about and looking at their data all the time. From the inside, I think it also makes their developers a lot happier. They like working on code that might be used somewhere else at some other point in time. So, you know, they have happier developers. They have people that are writing academic papers about their service. So, using a copy-left license for them makes a lot of sense. So, and I don't know if, I don't think anyone has really successfully forked Twitter. So, that, I mean, they could try, but they'd have to find another niece and user base and other kind of thing, you know. So, so those are two companies that use copy-left licenses that, you know, I would say are doing okay. Regardless of what your business model is, you do not want to be sued for patent infringement, right? No one, no one enjoys that. And there are a few licenses that specifically mention patents. GBL version 3 and Apache version 2 both say, like, hey, you can use all this code, but then don't come back and sue it for patent infringement for the functionality contained within the code that we're giving you a license to. Which is, um, it's kind of, it seems like a weird thing that you would have to say. It'd be like, oh, here, you can have, like, half my sandwich, but then don't be a jerk because I put onions in it, or something, you know. Maybe that, I'm not sure if that metaphor follows, but like, I'm giving you a thing, don't be a jerk. That's, you know, to put it more plainly. So the Apache license and GPL v3 both say that, like, hey, you can use all this code, but don't be a jerk on the stuff that is possibly patent encumbered in here. So, and that's tricky because certain companies are like, we really like being a jerk with our patents. I mean, not like when we're giving talks at conferences, but like, quietly with letters that we send in the middle of the night. So, you know, that's, hopefully your company's not a jerk. So, so I would say if you're going to use a license, a Apache permissive, GPL v3 is copy left, they both have patent protection clause. So that's the beginning of how you kind of start to grapple with the landmine of patent infringement. So, but we are going to talk more about patents. Does anyone, everyone's with me so far? Excellent. Okay. I just love this slide with the insane con posse. They represented themselves in court, which must have been amazing. Anyway, so patents, how do those work? So the patent bargain is supposed to be you publicize an invention that you have made some, some thought or idea or improvement that you intend to add to the grand sum of human endeavor. How nice of you. Except you would like 20 years monopoly on it. And the government says that's okay as long as you fully describe the invention so that at the end of the 20 years, like we can all make that whatever it is. Which is pretty good when what you're inventing is like a spinning Jenny or like a new type of railroad train or something like that because winding up the means of production to actually build lots of trains or spinning Jenny's or whatever may take you a couple of years, you have to go dig iron out of the ground and find people to make it into that thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So our patent system kind of comes from that time frame. As you might have guessed, I don't feel that that time frame is such a great fit for software because we don't really have to in order to share software that we wrote over the weekend. So the reason we call it so the bargain is a little uneven and famously scholars like to refer to the current situation as having too many nooks and crannies to really offer like fully like, oh hey, now everyone knows where the grand total sum of human knowledge is. And it's like, oh yeah, sure, they're just going to go to the USPTO and look at like, you know, 500,000 patents. No. Their site's actually terrible. Anything you search for like, it loads up as if from like a modem or something, like 10 results at a time. So the idea that patents are adding to the grand sum of human knowledge is a pretty weak one in this day and age. But we, you know, we're sort of stuck with it and I'll talk about that in a sec. So what patents do do is they protect your assets in so far as they give you the right to exclude others from working on what you've worked on if you have a patent. They don't really give you the right to do anything else. Like, you can't you can't make people like your version of the thing better or anything like that. All you can do is say, you've infringed my patent and I want you to stop and then also pay me. Which is surprisingly its own business model, actually. So patent trolls or they like to be called non-practicing entities. Everyone likes to be called something other than what you like to call them, I guess. But they end up costing firms that are actually producing products and writing code and software and making things approximately $29 billion a year and out of pocket cost. And this is from 2011. This is actually if you looked at it on a graph, it's one of those exponential growth rates. A couple of those things that have changed as far as patent trolls. The line between practicing and non-practicing entities has gotten a lot fuzzier. It's sort of this thing as if like you're in the park and like some guy ran by with an old lady's purse and then you were like, hey, where are all the old ladies? That's sort of what's happened. Practicing entities have figured out how to spin off arms that troll shell corporations that troll on their behalf. They license their patents to other companies with different names so that they can monetize their patents. So the line is very fuzzy. You'll see companies that used to have a practicing business in a couple of different areas and then like, you know, they didn't quite get where the technology was going and so now they have a few defunct areas and one area left where they're still practicing but they have patents on those other areas and so they are still sending letters. I just want to make sure that we're not only talking about trolls here. There are plenty of bad actors in this space. For companies, that means do you want to spend your money on R&D or do you want to spend your money on policing? Do you want to monetize your patents or do you want to pay money to make more things and do more innovation? And that's a real question. It's probably a little bit quicker money on the patent infringement suits but it doesn't really add much to the overall endeavor of our industry to have everybody working on policing each other all the time because eventually you run out of money to hire developers and actually make things. Which, you know, I might be a little biased on the developers versus patent infringement. So, so this is Colleen Chen. If you like reading academic papers on patents, she's the best place to start. I happen to, I know most people don't, but she's written a lot of papers on why to open up the patent system. She's done a lot of looking at the numbers on who is getting sued for patent infringement. It tends to be more often like smaller and medium sized companies than it used to be because the big companies have started fighting back. So, this is, these are some of the trends and things that are going on in patent infringement suit area. So, I work at the open invention network. One way that you can ameliorate your risk in free and open source software and is to join a defensive patent pool. There are also like some, so we run a defensive patent pool 10 years old with about 1900 companies and projects in there. And we all agree to not sue each other and then you get a crash license and all your patents. So, if you get sued from outside the pool, you can counter sue. There are also starting to be some other interesting ideas licensed on transfer network. I think maybe 80% of the patents that trolls use are coming from practicing entities originally. And so, there's now a lot of energy to kind of figure out like, well when we're done with patents, like well at least let's make sure we don't sound the trolls. Because that doesn't help anyone. So, the license on transfer network is an aggregate of companies that try to help each other not sell their patents to trolls when they're done with them. And then we also coordinate defensive publications. So, this is keeping other entities from getting patents on stuff that you might use but you don't want to actually get more patents. So, there are some ways to humiliate your risk and I don't want it to sound like it's all doom and gloom. So, there are some ways to humiliate your risk. So, if you do go and you talk to Legal and they're like, oh, I heard that we would get sued for using all that open source stuff. There's actually no numbers that show that open source companies get sued more. I think we just tend to talk about it more because we maybe make this more angry or I don't know. But and we also tend to know when each other are getting sued because it's a clear chain of upstream and downstream and things like that. So, defensive publications during the offensive patent pool and if you are going to create patents like be careful what happens to them when you're done with them. So, how else to go and do floss? Governance is how you talk about the way that you interact with the free software communities or the open source projects that you're participating in. And there are a lot of different models for this, so if you are like, oh, but what if we don't know how to have a relationship with an open source project or we don't know how to have, you know, what kinds of guidelines we should set up for our employees on participating and contributing to upstream. Luckily you do not have to reinvent the wheel. This has all been figured out before. There are plenty of other companies, probably your direct competitors or doing very similar things. So there's a lot of writing on governance out there. Again, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. You could probably tomorrow find like an example of here's our policy for having employees contribute to open source projects that fits your business model. So then we're going to do the 10 cent tour. So it's a very interesting time to be in. So when I started this we were just starting to be like, oh, these patents are a problem. It was like ten years ago and then it like now it's like, oh, aren't we almost done? There's almost solved or whatever. Yes and no. So there's a couple of different things. So we have had some federal patent reform already and we may yet still have more. There's a couple different ideas going on. Some of them are fee shifting where the idea is that there wouldn't be as much incentive to sue companies if when they lose the company gets paid back for their legal fees from the troll. That makes sense. So that's one of the ideas. Some of the other ideas are making it so that you have to do a better job of disclosing the real party in interest. So remember I talked about practicing entities that have like a like if it was like the Deb Nicholson Corporation and I'd be like, oh no, no, no, that's not me that's the Peb Nicholson Corporation. They just happen to have a license on all my patents. But some of the reform that's being discussed is I would have to be like, yeah, okay, I'm the sole owner of Peb Nicholson to be honest. So that's one thing and then also being clear about like what types of patents you're suing on. Like you can't just say like, it seems like you have some technology that we have some patents on. And there are like letters that don't really disclose anymore than that. Like they might say just a little bit like, yeah, we have some scanning technology patents and you scan. So I was like, what is that? But some letters don't say what activity the defendant is engaging in that is supposedly infringing on patents. So those are some of the ideas at the federal level. Some of this stuff about disclosing the real party in interest and saying the patent is actually being sued on and saying the activity the defendant is supposedly engaging in there that they're getting sued for. Different states have been trying to pass legislation that would address different parts of that. None of them have been able to do so much of the fee shifting unfortunately. That's seen as something that would have to happen at the federal level. So another thing that's an interesting opportunity for dealing with some of the frivolous and overly broad patents is interpartis review. So this is when a patent that already exists and is crummy, you go and you say like, I noticed this patent is crummy and I would like to tell the USPTO to look at it again and please do their job this time. This is a great tool. It's not cheap to use. You still need to hire people and pay some fees to USPTO to have them look at things. We also did a huge case last year, Alice vs. CLS bank which invalidated a lot of patents we think but you can still be sued by a patent that would not make it through a court case because the only way to know if it would make it through a court case is to have it do that actual process. So some of the estimates are that as many as 80% of the software patents that are currently on the books would be bogus if they were taken to court tomorrow. Of course that's really expensive, 80% of 200,000 software patents on the books that we would have to go to court and look at. So there's still a lot of patents out there and that's expensive to challenge them whether in court or by asking the USPTO to take a look at them. So strategies and resources communication is key. This is one of the we kind of touched on this at the beginning like leading with the business interest as opposed to leading with the why freedom is the best when you're talking to your employer depending on your employer of course. But communication is you have to tell them what you actually want to do as a business model. So if what you intend to monetize like if you're envisioning like maybe you're going to run like some kind of a service that's really niche it's going to be you know whatever microblogging for people who knit and you're like no no no yarn ads that's all we need doesn't matter what the software is we're going to be like yarn sellers are going to be busting down our door that's all we need. So if that's the case then tell your lawyer that they can't give you advice on what type of licensing to choose or you know how to think about how encumbered with patents your space is unless you give them all the information. So you want to make sure you're pretty thorough like this is what I envision us doing this is where I envision the money coming from and this is the way I envision us interacting with the community. So you want to be really clear about that. And timing is everything you cannot go in on Friday night and say we're going to release this code on Monday sometime if you just take a look at it over the weekend and make sure licenses are cool. No. That is the you will almost certainly get no they're not that is the only answer that you will get in that time frame. So I would say that earlier you start involving the person you want to have review your licensing plans the better. So you want to let them know like here's our new project here's some of the technologies that we're hoping to incorporate here's the codebase that we hope people are going to be linking our stuff up with here's the way that we want to be interacting with the community and you know at every step of the way if it changes it's like oh it turns out we're not going to do a new SQL it looks like it was going to be easy but it's kind of annoying or whatever it is. So you want to keep them apprised at every single step of the process. And then again the great listening skills are going to help you seal the deal. So if you use some of those arguments that I talked about at the beginning like oh it's free and then you skid her off into transparency and your boss says to you she's like did you say free? Like no money? So then you might want to just keep pressing on that point you know but the idea is to be responsive and have it be a dialogue you don't want to come in and read from a set of cards or this slide presentation even for your boss. You can use this if you think monkeys will help at your workplace. So so I hope that you'll jump in. I hope that you'll go out and talk to your employer about using more free software at work whether that's in tooling or whether that's in your actual product and stuff that you will go ahead and you know get them more invested contribute to upstream maybe get them up at your office it's great it will help you get more happy employees and you know and we'll build bigger greater things right. So these are a couple of organizations that want to help you do free software stuff the FSF they have an FAQ about their licenses the open invention network where I work which we would love to have you sign on for the less suing if you're into less suing we're into you software freedom concerns you which is working to police the licenses and make sure that people don't abuse them it's a if you think of the copy left code as a common making sure that everyone uses that responsibly OSI has another slice of lists of free and open source licenses that you can take a look at and they have some they have their own ideas and thoughts about like how some of those interact with each other and so these are all great resources Apache of course has a lot of information about their own license so find a buddy and I hope that you will get involved in free software I meant to put that the other way around but if you do like reading these kinds of things this was oops that first one CES just like two weeks ago there was an amazing panel on patents and fixing our broken innovation system with the new head of the USPTO did an intro on it and then they had someone from Qualcomm and a politician Darryl Eitha who has submitted some legislation on patent reform it kind of starts out really polite and then it like it gets no hold barred as you go along so if you want to know like why the policy landscape is kind of a mine field that panel will give you like one hour later you'll know you'll know exactly why it's a total mess if you want to share how to make money from open source platforms there's a four part series by John Mark Walker who is at Red Hat at the time on Linux.com talking about like why the Red Hat model is reproducible and you know so we talked about that a little bit and why some of the other models when people think oh we're just like Red Hat we have community and we have different versions of code that's enough right it's a little more complicated than that and he goes really into it and then like I said if you like reading academic papers about patent trolls and stuff Colleen Chen is great and then Julia Samuels who she was an EFF and now she's at her own organization and has been looking at the legislation that might impact the scope of patent ability especially for software so these are all well if you like this topic then you will enjoy looking at these of course it wouldn't be a legal talk without all of the credits and then I would be more than happy to take your questions thanks oh obviously I'm Deb you could even my colleague too she co-presented with me the last time we talked about this so alright what do you think is your brain full or I knew that yeah in the back so I'd actually take a look at the I'd take a look at John Marks piece on that too I'm sorry the question was is there a line on which parts you open and which parts you don't in general if you are trying to give something away in hopes that it will make people want to buy something from you what you give away should not be crappy so if you're your business model is we will make a crappy version of something and hopefully that will attract people to want to give us money for another version of it that's not that business model is not going to work out for you if you people have had more success with we gave away something that people actually wanted and then there are a couple little add ons that are proprietary although you know it depends on the space and what your users like as to how well that works I'm not a super fan of proprietary software so maybe not the best first natural advice on how to mix and match but there is some stuff about business models and mix and matches that don't work in that piece there does that help a little bit right so it depends on what your business model is if you're using an old style kind of like Microsoft 5 years ago business model kind of already painted yourselves into a corner but if you're looking to kind of you can only prop up older business model with technical constraints for so long eventually people will find a way around it or just find another thing to use so if you're trying really hard to get people to pay for something that they really really don't want to pay for see like cord cutters they will figure out a way to not pay for it whether it means getting it from someone else or not doing it I guess the idea is to kind of talk with your CEO about looking at newer business models and why some of the traditional companies that have never used open source before are starting to use some and why they're opening up and doing that so that's without knowing too much more about your specific situation that's what I would say is that if your business model relies on trying to get people to do something they don't want to do then you might want to start moving to other business models so yeah yeah you're still going to know your code the best and so if you're selling code plus something and you think that people mostly want the other something whether that's hardware or service or you know access to the platform then yeah the expertise that you have because you wrote it is always going to override someone who forks it and starts to try to use it tomorrow other questions the green lantern has no questions okay good to know if you have questions that you didn't want to ask in front of the sorry I'm on the wrong direction here if you have questions that you didn't want to ask in front of the group I'm a debit open invention network you can always ask me stuff in that regard as a seminar lawyer so you know I won't give you free legal advice this is not a backdoor to free legal advice but I can point you at some other resources if there's something else okay so for the recording if there's one um Der Hunz has said that the freeze and freedom obcast is another place for pedantic but accessible conversation on free software legal topics and and you can use it's usually tagged pretty well like every five minutes like what the topic was that's covered so if you are looking to get another perspective on something specific it's pretty searchable and easy to find the uh episode where they discussed that topic anything else to add or ask or okay awesome thanks so much for coming