Red Hat Summit: Getting a grip on licensing laws

Peter Parker writes “NEW ORLEANS — Getting a grip on all the legalities associated with open source and proprietary software licensing is a daunting task. To gain that understanding, says Mark Webbink, general counsel for Red Hat, one first needs to understand the true legal implications of words like patent, copyright, proprietary and open. After that, students of software law can get into more advanced subjects, such as an examination of what happens when developers mingle applications that were created under different licenses.

Webbink led a session at last week’s Red Hat Summit in an effort to help Linux users and developers better understand the legalities of the software business. Here, Webbink answers several of the questions that attendees posed during that session:”