Most developers don’t dream of one day growing up to be open source licensing experts. But with the vast majority of enterprise applications now using open source code, one small licensing misstep can lead to huge, costly problems. 

We’re lucky to have an open source licensing expert in Tidelift co-founder Luis Villa. He’s agreed to spend 45 minutes on Wednesday, August 26 to help you navigate the wild and wooly open source licensing landscape in our upcoming webinar Everything you never wanted to know about open source licenses and were too bored to ask. 

You can register for that webinar here, but in the meantime, check out his recent open source licensing discography below to get a sample of the kinds of licensing-related knowledge he’ll be dropping on August 26.

Evaluating an ethical license for corporate use

Earlier this year, the authors of the Hippocratic License (a license that prohibits usage in situations that violate human rights) released version 2.0, and the vcr project adopted it. In this blog post, Luis shares how an attorney (like him) might assess this license change and advise clients. Read more here.

Open source licenses: 2019 year in review

2019 was a wild year in the open source licensing world, and in this post Luis dives into some of the most interesting trends, discussing licensing news from China to Silicon Valley, from rawest capitalism to most thoughtful ethics. 

The state of the copyleft license

In this post, Luis dives deeper into one important type of license, those that require sharing of modifications under certain conditions, often called “copyleft” or “reciprocal” licenses. Examples include the well-known GNU General Public License and a spectrum of others, including the “network” Affero GPL (whose conditions may be triggered by use in services) and a variety of “weak” copylefts like the Eclipse and Mozilla licenses (whose conditions generally require sharing of fewer classes of changes). 

The state of licensing information (or, how do we know what we know?)

As open source has grown, it has also gotten more granular. Modern apps often depend on hundreds or thousands of open source packages, not counting the underlying operating system, which often contains hundreds or thousands of packages itself. So what do we know about the licenses in these increasingly large and complex software systems? The answer is: maybe not as much as users of the code would like. Check out the full post here.

Have any questions for Luis?

When you register for the webinar, you’ll have a chance to pose your questions that you’d like Luis to answer live. Luis will try to get to as many of these questions as possible. Look forward to seeing you at the webinar on Wednesday, August 26 at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST).