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Discussion on: AMA with Heather Meeker, Open Source Licensing Expert (and Musician)

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Heather Meeker

Unfortunately some legal counsel are still not very knowledgeable about open source, and they consider it a big scary problem. People always fear what they don't understand. (I feel this way about the areas of law I don't know, too.) When it comes to using OSS of others, counsel will be concerned about copyleft licenses like Affero GPL or even GPL. And yet, often, using code under these licenses is not a problem -- you just need to have a compliance process in place, and to understand your use case. Over the years, legal counsel have learned more about OSS, and it's now part of the toolkit of most tech lawyers. But sometimes, we need to do a little education to make them comfortable. I find that it's usually possible to address OSS concerns, and when it's not, it's because of an unwillingness of counsel to learn.

Thanks for the question!