SFLC year end report & request for donations

[Dennis Kibbe]

Scroll about have way down for a summary of what the Software Freedom
Law Center has accomplished in it's third year of existence. Worth
reading especially if you're not familiar with their work. -Dennisk

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Eben Moglen <donate at softwarefreedom.org>
To: dennisk at member.fsf.org
Subject: Support SFLC
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 19:22:45 -0500 (EST)

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you to ask that you consider a donation to the Software
Freedom Law Center this year as you make your year-end giving plans. Now
completing its third year of life, SFLC has produced a body of
distinguished legal work in the public interest. Our ability to continue
this work relies on your support.

http://softwarefreedom.org/donate

When my colleagues and I formed SFLC in 2005, with the generous support
of the Open Source Development Lab and its member companies, our
intention was to build a legal services organization for a unique
community: the far-flung collection of programmers and projects that
constitute the non-profit Free Software and Open Source landscape. Our
philosophy of practice is that early legal assistance offered to
projects when they are young prevents problems, reduces friction, and
benefits everyone. We are primarily counselors and advisers, rather than
litigators; we believe in being, where appropriate, "lawyers for the
situation," in Louis Brandeis' classic phrase, rather than partisans.

Our clients are talented and generous people who put their technical
virtuosity and hard work into making wonderful software everyone can
freely copy, modify, and share. Our practice on their behalf conforms to
their values: we try to create agreement and eliminate artificial
barriers to innovation and access to technology. Our goal is to
eliminate risks today, rather than to sue over them tomorrow.

In these last three years we are proud to have built a client list that
includes the Apache Software Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, the Free
Software Foundation, the Sakai Foundation, the Software Freedom
Conservancy and X.org to name just a few. Some high-profile activities,
like our involvement in the making of GPLv3, have received more than
their share of attention. But it's the less visible aspects of our
practice that have, in my opinion, created the most value for our
clients and the surrounding community. For example, we have helped
projects to restructure and reorganize themselves to ensure sound
corporate form and governance, limiting liability that could have
jeopardized the very projects that those structures were establish to
protect.

Reproduced below is our information sheet that lists some of the work we
can talk about. We've been active invalidating patents, reviewing code
bases sullied by accusations of infringement, providing licensing
assistance, pursuing enforcement, developing copyright and trademark
policies with our clients and publishing educational materials that we
hope will benefit the whole community.

I've been practicing legal education as well as law for twenty years,
and from my perspective, SFLC is as important for its role in training
lawyers specialized in these issues as it is for the client service it
provides. SFLC is able to recruit, employ, and train lawyers who will
carry on the representation of FOSS programmers not only in the US, but
around the world. We are preparing to open our first affiliated
practice, in New Delhi, India, where we plan to participate from the
ground up in the development of the Indian free software development
community.

Of course, as every fundraising letter must sooner or later surrender to
cliche and disclose, "all this costs money." Vendor support is still the
mainstay of our funding; we're very grateful for the generous support of
the companies who provide funds to ensure that hackers have counsel.

But if the vendors are our only contributors, we put at risk our
definition as a public charity, and rightly so. We don't want to be
lawyers offering services to hackers on behalf of a community of
corporations: We want to be lawyers working for, coming from, and
supported by the community as a whole.

Free software law from the beginning--or at least as far back as my
experience extends--was always about reducing friction by increasing the
peace. The cardinal idea that we all do better by sharing, which has
gone hand in hand with transparency and peaceful methods of dispute
resolution, has created both economic and social value beyond all but
the most wildly optimistic expectations. Please help me, and the
outstanding colleagues who practice with me at SFLC, to continue doing
what we can to represent, cherish, and foster this way of making
software.

http://softwarefreedom.org/donate

Software freedom is good for almost everyone, and it needs to be
protected. This year, please give generously.

Thank you,

Eben Moglen
President and Executive Director


________________________________________________________________________
Software Freedom Law Center
November 2007


About Us
The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal representation and other
law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS). Founded in 2005, we now represent many of the most
important and well-established free software and open source projects.
As an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, we are able to
offer our services for free to the developers we represent.


What We've Been Doing
The Software Freedom Law Center has made significant strides in
accomplishing our mission to protect and advance Free and Open Source
Software. Since our founding, we have:

      * Built from scratch the technological infrastructure required to
        run a law firm using entirely Free and Open Source Software.
        This includes a VoIP system that allows for sophisticated
        telephone call routing and conference calling at a fraction of
        the traditional costs of such services, as well as a time
        tracking system that allows SFLC staff to record and report time
        spent on SFLC activities.
      * Provided legal and organizational support to our client's
        process of updating the GNU General Public License to version 3
        (GPLv3). SFLC created a web-based public document commenting
        system which facilitates public discussion of documents. SFLC
        helped draft the new license and mediated the GPLv3 discussion
        committees.
      * Successfully defended against a lawsuit filed in the Southern
        District of Indiana alleging that the GPL is an anticompetitive
        restraint of trade.
      * Published white papers to share our legal expertise with the
        broader FOSS community. These papers have considered: using GPL
        licensed software in light of Sarbanes-Oxley; alleged patent
        issues with implementing the OpenDocument format; U.S. rules
        governing Software Defined Radios; standards for
        copyrightability; and guidelines for maintaining
        permissive-licensed code in a GPL project.
      * Launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that
        acts as a fiscal sponsor to FOSS projects and provides them with
        financial and administrative services. Member projects now
        include ArgoUML, Boost, BusyBox, Inkscape, Libbraille,
        Mercurial, OpenChange, SurveyOS, Samba, uCLibc and Wine.
      * Co-hosted a conference on software patents held at Boston
        University and MIT. Held our first annual legal summit and
        included an afternoon of educational presentations to the
        public.
      * Filed a formal request with the U.S. Patent and Trademark
        Office, asking them to re-examine Blackboard's patent on
        e-learning systems. The Patent Office accepted the request and
        ordered re-examination of the patent.
      * Audited OpenHAL's code base and determined that there was no
        illegal copying from Atheros' proprietary HAL code. We also
        analyzed its ISC license compatibility. OpenHAL is low-level
        interface software for Atheros-based wireless cards, which is
        used in both Linux and OpenBSD systems.
      * Filed the first-ever U.S. GPL infringement lawsuit on behalf of
        developers of BusyBox against Monsoon Multimedia. The case has
        settled and the defendant has promised to comply with the GPL.
Inside SFLC: Review of Linux Wireless Code Completed
Last month, SFLC announced that it had carefully reviewed the lineage of
the open source Atheros wireless driver for Linux and determined which
portions can be distributed under the ISC license (also known as the
2-clause BSD license).

The licensing situation for the Atheros driver is complex because much
of it was originally derived from an OpenBSD project called ar5k. This
original code is licensed under the ISC license, but Linux code is
typically licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL
places specific additional requirements on distributors of software to
ensure that its users are able to obtain the software's source code, and
freely to copy, modify, and redistribute all subsequent modified
versions.

Ultimately, all the copyright holders of the Linux ath5k-driver code,
derived from ar5k, were contacted and agreed to license their changes
under the ISC license, thus allowing improvements to be re-incorporated
into OpenBSD. One of the three historical branches of the code reviewed
by SFLC, however, included portions that are only licensed under the
GPL, and SFLC has determined that it would be very difficult to
re-incorporate that code into OpenBSD.

To share its knowledge with the FOSS and legal communities and to share
background regarding its analysis, SFLC also released two documents of
general interest. One document is a set of guidelines for developers who
wish to incorporate code with a permissive license, such as ISC, into a
GPL-licensed project. The other paper discusses the legal standards of
originality with regard to computer programs under U.S. and
international copyright law.

This is not the first time that SFLC has worked with the Linux Wireless
developers. In July, SFLC announced that it had performed a confidential
audit of the open source Atheros driver and determined that no portion
of it was illegally copied from Atheros' proprietary code.


For More Information...
Visit us at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/


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