How to Talk With Your Legal Department About Open Source

Open source software (OSS) is today an integral part of software solutions and the software industry as a whole. However, it is often the case that not all parts of an organization are equally familiar with the OSS ecosystem and the specific licenses upon which it relies. Since this ecosystem is built on intellectual property, discussions about using OSS, patching existing OSS projects, or publishing one's own software as an OSS project inevitably involve conversations with the legal department at some point. In this talk, we will discuss some of the fundamentals of intellectual property, OSS licenses, how lawyers tend to think about software in general, and how to convince them that OSS is a good idea.