The Linux Foundation Hosts Legal Spring Summit

The Linux Foundation Hosts Spring Legal Summit

Industry’s top open source legal experts share experiences at exclusive Linux Foundation Summit

SAN FRANCISCO, March 26, 2007 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the details for its second Legal Summit, which will be held at the Motorola Customer Briefing Center in Schaumburg, Ill on April 23, 2008.

To register, please visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/events/legal.

The LF Legal Summits provide an important vendor-neutral forum for leading in-house counsel from member companies HP, IBM, Intel, Novel, Oracle, Red Hat and others, to collaborate in the development of programs to address legal issues surrounding Linux and open source software. The Summits are led by the LF’s legal team Karen Copenhaver and Andy Updegrove.

“The Legal Summits are an important component of the LF’s event roster. They provide a unique opportunity for in-house counsel to cut through the FUD and discuss what successful companies are doing to realize the benefits of Linux and open source while meeting the requirements of today’s legal environment,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

The Summit will include panels, question and answer periods, and breaks for networking. Discussion topics will include: how open source projects work; how licenses for open source projects can be determined and confirmed; and how companies develop effective compliance policies providing for both the use of open source software in business operations and contributions by employees back to community projects. Counsel will also share their experiences releasing commercial offerings under an open source license and the challenge of building communities around the contributions.

The first LF Legal Summit was held October 25 – 26, 2007 in Boston and focused on effective ways to collaborate in the development of compliance, education programs, and evolving intellectual property rights policies optimized to support open development models.

For companies and organizations interested in attending these member-only events but who are not currently LF members, please contact memberservices@linuxfoundation.org.

The recently launched blog on open source legal matters is available at: www.linux-foundation.org/blogs/legal.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. For more information, please visit www.linux-foundation.org.
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