Patently Obvious
The year the lawyers came to FOSS
Neil McGovern
A long-term contributor to free software, Neil McGovern has held posts on the boards of Software in the Public Interest, Open Rights Group and served a term as the Debian Project Leader. Neil currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.
In August 2019, GNOME was notified that it was being sued in the state of California over a broad patent which allegedly covered Shotwell, a photo management application. The plaintiff? A prolific filer of patent suits, and a patent assertion entity. This was the first time that a FOSS project has been sued for patent infringement.
This talk is the story from the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, on how he responded and the strategies taken to not only defeat the suit, but to secure a ground-breaking agreement which means that this particular PAE will never be able to sue any FOSS project ever again.
- Date:
- 2020 November 13 - 10:10
- Duration:
- 30 min
- Room:
- Room 3
- Conference:
- SeaGL 2020
- Language:
- Track:
- Difficulty:
- Easy
- Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer!
- Start Time:
- 2020 November 13 10:10
- Room:
- Room 1
- Rise up for free software in schools!
- Start Time:
- 2020 November 13 10:10
- Room:
- Room 2