Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

by Lawrence Rosen

Covers the legal implications of open source and free software licensing and the intellectual property laws that support open source licensing.

Genres: Law, Software

422 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 2004

About the author

Lawrence Rosen is the Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is both an anthropologist and a lawyer. His main interests are in the relation between cultural concepts and their implementation in social and legal relationships

He is the author of The Culture of Islam; Varieties of Muslim Experience; Bargaining For Reality; and Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew; all also published by the University of Chicago Press.

He teaches courses on law and anthropology, comparative religious systems, the American Indian and the law, and the theory of cultural systems. He received the Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997 and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 1997-98.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gives a good overview of the open source licenses out there, why open source licensing exists, and what it means for the different types of developers who use it. While it strikes a good (and obviously difficult) balance between being educational and informative while avoiding legalese or textbook-like explanations, I found it just a tad on the preachy side. There's a lot of "software freedom" that gets thrown around, and some of it left me feeling like proprietary (this book taught me not to say "commercial") software is in its own, money-seeking, irrelevant world completely separate from the open-source, software freedom goals of the author. Overall a good resource, especially for a topic like this that has very little in the way of academic resources comparing all the open source licenses. However, I would definitely recommend supplementing this resource--both to get a different point of view and to include more recent legal developments since this book's publication, which could significantly change the content of some of the chapters.

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on licensing and pricing for the knowledge worker, manager, executive, or entrepreneur.