Hi! My name is Heather. I’m a General Partner at OSS Capital, and a lawyer in private practice specializing in open source software licensing.
I learned to program when I was a child, and since then, I’ve been fascinated by software and technology. I like to sing and play music (drums), and I like weightlifting and dancing -- but not at the same time.
Latest comments (34)
lucarb999.com/ Europe storms: Children among dead in France, Austria and Italy
Strong tempests have battered areas of focal and southern Europe, killing something like 12 individuals including three kids.
The passings, most from falling trees, were accounted for in Italy and Austria, and on the French island of Corsica.
Weighty downpour and winds destroyed campgrounds on the island, while in Venice, Italy, brick work was brushed off the belltower of St Mark's Basilica.
The tempests follow a long time of heatwave and dry spell across a significant part of the mainland.
In Corsica, twists blasting up to 224 km/h (140mph) removed trees and harmed trailers.
Specialists there said a 13-year-old young lady was killed by a falling tree on a camping area.
Inside Minister Gérald Darmanin, who showed up in Corsica on Thursday, said 20 individuals had been harmed - four of them truly.
Just about 13,000 individuals were cleared from a few campgrounds on Thursday night and protected in open structures, in front of more anticipated harm. Yet, specialists said on Friday morning that the night had passed with practically no significant occurrences.
Outrageous tempests have become more successive as of late in light of environmental change.
Observers to the tempests said they had been totally unforeseen and no advance notice was given.
"We have never seen such immense tempests as this, you would think it was a typhoon," eatery proprietor Cedric Boell told Reuters news organization.
On the French central area, a few southern regions were hit by power cuts and roads were overflowed in the nation's subsequent city, Marseille.
In Austria two young ladies matured four and eight were killed by a falling tree close to a lake in Carinthia.
Afterward, three ladies were accounted for to have kicked the bucket in Lower Austria territory, likewise because of a falling tree.
Authorities said 13 individuals had been harmed, including five youngsters.
Four different ways environmental change is influencing climate
Hannes Primus, city chairman of the Wolfsberg region where the two young ladies were killed, said the region has been left looking "like a combat zone".
In the mean time in Italy, a man and a lady were killed by falling trees in discrete episodes in the locale of Tuscany.
High breezes moved throughout Venice, blowing bistro umbrellas across St Mark's Square and dislodging brickwork from the church belltower.
Ocean side hotels in Tuscany and further north in Liguria were harmed by the tempests.
Tuscan local pioneer Eugenio Giani posted a video of a ferris wheel going crazy in high breezes at Piombino.
In any case, in southern Italy, the heatwave proceeded, with temperatures of up to 40C kept in Sicily.
Furthermore, across the Mediterranean Sea in Algeria, somewhere around 38 individuals have passed on in backwoods fires.
Many pieces of Europe have seen a long time of uncommonly sweltering and dry climate.
Outrageous climate occasions, including both heatwaves and storms, have become more serious and more continuous lately due to human-incited environmental change.
The world has proactively warmed by around 1.1C since the modern time started and temperatures will continue to rise except if state run administrations all over the planet make steep slices to emanations.
Hey Heather!
Thanks for the AMA!! I have a question about copyright and multiple licenses,
when and why do add a copyright message/template at the header of each file of oss codebase? does it relate to any license?
also would there be any bad impression for enterprises if we use permissive (90%) and copyleft(10%) licenses to save the core of the project? and what should be the best practices to sign CLAs for such case?
Hi Heather,
Maybe a complicated one here…
Does training a neural net/ML model on a copyrighted dataset that is licensed under a reciprocal license X: a) subject the model to the reciprocal license X; b) enable the copyright owner to have a serious colorable claim under the license or copyright law to rights to the trained model; and/or c) cause any other wonky unexpected effects in contract or copyright law?
Presume the model is not distributed, but merely is used to enable SaaS software usage by third parties…
Thanks!!!
Hello. I would be curious to hear more of your current thinking on "open core" licensing.
Open core does everything that is needed legally speaking for the data platform and associated tooling that our small firm offers. However, in practice, it seems to leave a bad taste in the mouth for a certain number of individual developers (even if they are not the target market for any of our commercial services) and it confuses some number of larger organizations (who are the target market, but may have varying levels of technical understanding about the open and closed components that their complete solution will entail).
Do you see more understandable alternatives to open core emerging? Is this just the challenge of marketing and selling complex software whatever the licensing model?
Thank you.
Hi Heather,
two questions:
Can you recommend a contributor's license template?
just for fun: Is it correct that public domain is not officially "open source" (because it is not OSI-approved?)?
Thank you for doing this AMA! much appreciated ❤️
Vivien.
For a CLA, I usually use a modified and slimmed down version of the Apache CLA. They use two different forms -- individual and corporate, and I have combined them, and removed some of the Apache terms. I'm happy to share that form if you like, just send me an email. That having been said, there are lots of CLA forms, and they are mostly identical in substance. (BTW I don't think CLAs are necessary for projects with permissive licenses, because the CLA is nearly identical in substance to a permissive license.)
Question 2 is indeed a fun one. Public domain is not officially open source, because the open source definition describes a license. Some public domain dedications, like CC0 or (shudder) WTF, actually have license terms, too. That's because in some countries, theoretically you can't actually dedicate a copyrightable work to the public domain. (An example of the the overthinking mentioned above.) These documents have a fallback license, in case the public domain dedication is unenforceable. Actually the recent kerfuffle about CC0, BTW, is that it doesn't grant patent rights. But it would not be very rational to release code under CC0 if you had any patents on it that you wanted to actually enforce.
Thanks for the questions!
Hi Heather, thanks for hosting the AMA. I have two semi-related questions:
If you don't use a CLA, AND you want to change the outbound license for a project, AND you have used a copyleft license (like GPL, AGPL, or LGPL) you usually have to do a clean-up project to get new rights for your project. That is a pain!
When I have advised on those projects, we usually did a 3-tier approach. Some contributions are very small (a few lines, a non-code change) and don't usually require any re-licensing. Some contributions are from contributors who are still involved in the project, and we just send them a CLA to acknowledge. (Usually they don't object.) For those who don't respond, you can push out a notice saying "We are changing our project license, please speak now or forever hold your peace." That is not the best position, legally, but it's often all you can do. If anyone actually does object, you remove the code from the project.
If you have used a permissive license for the project, you don't need all this. You just preserve the original license notice for pre-change contributions. You end up with two license notices, but that's not such a bad thing.
Thanks for the question!
I guess "tell me the license you go with and I'll tell you who you are" talks a lot about me, or the friends I hang out with? 😆
Thank you for the answers to both questions! I now know a lot more about this than I did before.
The fallback license seems to depend on the community, in my experience. People in the Linux development area do seem to default to MIT, because it is GPL compatible. (But then they often dual license under GPL and MIT, which is...weird.) In corporate world, the default license for releases is usually Apache 2.0, because it has patent terms.
Hello Heather,
This comment is just a greeting and kudos, since there is a precedent above for having no question per se. My tenuous connection to open source consists of owning a Helium Hotspot and a Linux computer, and vaguely knowing that both companies use software operating primarily under open source licensing. I've read a few of your easy to understand articles on complex topics such as inflation, AGPL and DAO's. We met in person years ago at a Yale event and discussed your work on non competitive game theory! So I am delighted that you have become successful and world-famous and that I had an opportunity to meet you years ago.
Thanks for the shout-out, Brenda! It's great to hear from you and I hope you are doing great.
Yes, doing great! Beat Gloria Steinem by one year by marrying a man at age 67! (Her first marriage was at age 66). Sending "Connect" on LinkedIn.
Hi Heather,
Is it mandatory to disclose the linking type of the components in the notice file of software?
No, it's not. Linking method really only matters for LGPL. Some customers, buyers or investors will ask for the information so they can do diligence on LGPL use. But for most licenses it is irrelevant. And no open source licenses requires you to disclose it in a license notice.
Thanks for the question!
Your diligent effort has not slipped through the cracks. I and the whole senior administration might want to compliment you on working effectively. เล่นสล็อต
Hello, Heather—
Long-time listener, first-time caller. 😄
Lawyers often like to include OSS disclosure obligations and/or audit rights or responsibilities. Is disclosure or audit better in your view? Can disclosure obligations lead to over-disclosure or inaccurate disclosures that create risk?
MDH
Hi Melody!
Audits are useful, but they can be overkill depending on the situation. They are never wrong, of course. I like to say that they are like insurance -- it's never wrong to buy it, but you might be insuring against risks that are very unlikely to arise. Disclosures are very important, not only for the information they convey, but how they demonstrate internal open source compliance processes. If a company (usually in an M&A, investment or sales deal) delivers a disclosure that is unprofessional or lacking information (or the clearly-inaccurate "we don't use any open source"), then it's often best to do an audit. But if the disclosure looks good, then an audit usually doesn't yield any additional material risks.
Thanks for the question!
Hey Heather,
I don't have any question per se, as you were very VERY helpful to have a call with OpenBB team very early on to discuss some concerns we were having.
So just came to support your AMA, and thank you for being kind enough to spend some time with us. 😊
It is truly my pleasure!