At the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference in October 2011, Rackspace announced that it would be moving the OpenStack open source project to a separate foundation. Following that, OpenStack invited community participation to help guide the process of moving to a foundation. There have been a number of lessons learned during this process and a couple of members of the OpenStack Drafting Committee would like to share those with you. This session will be led by Alice King, Vice President & Associate General Counsel, Rackspace, and Eileen Evans, Vice President & Associate General Counsel, Hewlett-Packard Company.
In this talk the patent context of open source and Linux will be outlined including the evolution from the SCO litigation through to the Mobile Patent Wars. As part of this history the formation and operational evolution of OIN from passive to active deterrent will be discussed with an eye toward providing OpenStack Foundation members the benefit of OIN's experience as well as offering a set of considerations designed to aid in shaping the Foundation's IP policy. This session will be presented by Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network, in the hope of ensuring the Foundation's IP policy advances the OpenStack project's goals and is coherent with OIN's community-based approach to the preservation of freedom from patent aggression.
The past five years have been a time of significant transformation in the legal and policy side of open source, particularly concerning expectations around relationships between open source community projects and corporate participants. This talk will discuss these developments and explain how they are illustrated by the launch of the OpenStack project and the licensing, contribution and governance models it has adopted.
