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July 20, 2005
Good informal lunch meeting today
We had an informal lunch get together today. The consensus is that it went well. The attendees were: Dan Bricklin, Ralph Katz (consultant), Peter Moldave (lawyer, Gesmer Updegrove), Scott Peterson (corporate counsel, Hewlett-Packard), and David Rickerby (lawyer, Choate Hall & Stewart).
We discussed lots of legal and business model stuff about the GPL. What came out of it (as suggested by Scott Peterson) was a desire to help developers add the "Here's how I define the unclear areas of the GPL with regards to MY product" side-language to their product's licensing information. This could be noting the areas where there may be questions (e.g., how are the plug-ins to THIS product treated with regards to the GPL reciprocal licensing) and sample wordings for different answers to the questions. This isn't trying to "weasel out" of the GPL. Scott: "We want to do what you want us to do. Just tell me what it is!" The problem is that it is often too unclear and that is holding back adoption of Open Source software. David Rickerby volunteered to start as the point person on moving ahead with this (drickerby at choate dot com).
Posted by danb at 04:11 PM
July 19, 2005
Open discussion lunch tomorrow
Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 20th, 2005, we're having a small informal lunch at a restaurant in Newton Centre. Dan Bricklin and at least three OSS-savy lawyers will be there (one in-house counsel and two from law firms), and perhaps an entrepreneur or two. If this is worthwhile, we'll try to have other informal lunches and/or breakfasts.
Specifics: 12 noon - 1:30 pm. Sabra Restaurant, 45 Union Street, Newton Center. (On the corner of Union Street and Langley Road, very near the Riverside Green-line "T" stop, and around the corner from the parking lot at Beacon Street and Centre Streets in Newton, Massachusetts.) They have an "all you can eat" lunch buffet of middle eastern food, including many vegetarian dishes. We'll each buy our own lunch.
Posted by danb at 12:24 PM