Summary

This chapter scratched the surface of license and IP management in terms of open source but aimed to give you enough insight and knowledge so that you can start down the path of understanding this concept.

There are several resources to help guide you on this topic, namely FOSSMarks [32], some of the legal articles coming out of the Linux Foundation [33], and the Software Freedom Law Center [34]. For a lot of the basic needs of a project, this chapter is helpful, but I always encourage projects to seek legal advice as they get into more broad concerns and questions. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, I am not a lawyer and cannot provide legal advice.

One thing you will note that I didn’t speak about is license enforcement – and that was intentional. While there are some narrow cases where taking legal action against a license violator is advisable, in the vast majority of cases, reaching out to them is a much better solution. One comment I’...