Date: Monday May 18th, 2009

Event: Risk Management in Open Source Code and Licensing

Speakers:

Bruce Perens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_perens):  Government IT policy, net neutrality and corporate software procurement policy. Innovation Goes Public

Open Source provides much of the software infrastructure for many of the world’s largest companies and organizations: Google, Pixar, Amazon, the City of New York, the U.S. Air Traffic Control System, and probably /you/ - although you might not know it. Innovative products like Linux, Firefox, and Apache are the market-leaders in their sectors, but there are tens of thousands of Open Source programs, used for just about everything.

But the economics of Open Source are non-intuitive: how can you make money by giving software away? Why did IBM de-emphasize AIX, after spending Billions, in favor of Linux, the product of a loose collaboration of programmers that it can never control?

And how has Open Source maintained its excellent security record in the face of the very loose organization of its development teams? How can the world’s greatest city trust Open Source to help manage its jails?

How do Open Source teams manage security at all points of the long process from developers to users?

What do the Open Source licenses mean to you and your customers? Does Open Source increase legal risk, reduce it, or just change it?

Bruce Perens is one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software. He represented the Open Source community at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the request of the U.N. Development Agency. He is currently developing a paradigm-breaking software product, and supports that effort by consulting to national governments, major corporations, and others

Kate Spelman (http://cobaltlaw.com/kate-spelman.html):  Anti-circumvention clauses of the GPL3.

David Marr - Director, Legal, Open Source Group and Global Engineering Sun Microsystems, Inc. Menlo Park, CA:  Open Source Litigation Trends in the US and Abroad.

Panel Discussion (participants to be named) on risk issues inherent in Open Source Code and Licensing.

Time: 7:30 - 4:00PM (includes breakfast during registration and lunch).

Cost: Free to all registrants.

Co-Sponsoring Organizations:
The Infrastructure Management Institute of the College of Informatics at Northern Kentucky University (http://imi.nku.edu/)

The Cincinnati Chapter of the Licensing Executive Society (http://www.usa-canada.les.org/chapters/cincinnati/)

The Cincinnati Intellectual Property Law Association (CincyIP) (http://www.cincyip.org/)

Location: Northern Kentucky University - Ballroom in the Student Union Center (Directions)

Hotel: A block of rooms have been reserved at the Garfield Suites in downtown Cincinnati.  The block of rooms will be held for reservations until April 17th to get the block rate (one bedroom suites at the rate of $99 plus tax; two bedroom suites at $129 plus tax).  Reservations by calling the Garfield Suites at 800-367-2155 or online using the following link: http://reservations.ihotelier.com/crs/g_reservation.cfm?groupID=324918&hotelID=3624.  If you need transportation from the Garfield Suites to Northern Kentucky University - please let us know.