auto-CLE: free and open source software licenses
At the most recent Tuesday nite gathering of the local filthy liberal hippies, I was kinda caught with my pants down by a guy who works for the military-industrial complex [1], when he asked me about types of free and open-source software licenses that I'd never heard of. I spluttered, "Uh, Apache and FreeBSD are types of licenses? I thought they were a operating systems." Do people even say "flavors of UNIX" any more? I thought in a panic. "They're just flavors of UNIX, ha-ha-ha, uh, heh-heh." (Yes, I know they're both.) And I felt pretty stupid, though I did have the presence of mind not to add, "I thought MIT was a school," and then I cleverly shifted the conversation -- as lawyers are trained to do -- back to something I could discourse more intelligently about, namely, the evils of software and business-method patents.
The next morning over coffee, I took stock of my situation. Bottom line, I'd been sailing along for the past several months with having basically, "Oh, I do both kinds of licenses, country and western GPL and Creative Commons" on my resume, while not realizing how complicated the practical scene had gotten while I was poking around my ivory tower in law school.
So I've been spending the past couple of days doing a sort of self-CLE on the difference between free software and open-source software, copyleft and permissive licenses, etc., etc. Will be putting it all in a memo or at least a detailed outline for myself. I mean, I do purport to be an expert in this stuff.
And that's how I've been passing the days lately. When I haven't been doing housework.
[1] He works on GPS implementation for company that also happens to make fighter jets and nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.
The next morning over coffee, I took stock of my situation. Bottom line, I'd been sailing along for the past several months with having basically, "Oh, I do both kinds of licenses, country and western GPL and Creative Commons" on my resume, while not realizing how complicated the practical scene had gotten while I was poking around my ivory tower in law school.
So I've been spending the past couple of days doing a sort of self-CLE on the difference between free software and open-source software, copyleft and permissive licenses, etc., etc. Will be putting it all in a memo or at least a detailed outline for myself. I mean, I do purport to be an expert in this stuff.
And that's how I've been passing the days lately. When I haven't been doing housework.
[1] He works on GPS implementation for company that also happens to make fighter jets and nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.