Walking With Elephants
Information on open source, software, copyright, patents, and competition.
____________
Information on: ____________ If you are looking for Damian Brasher's site on open source collaborative development, walkingwiththelephants, click here. | For over seven years I had the privilege of serving as general counsel and deputy general counsel - intellectual property for the world's premier open source software vendor, Red Hat, Inc. When I started out there, I knew a good bit about intellectual property and software licensing, but I knew far less about open source and the effort to set information free. Along the way I also learned a great deal about the economics of the information technology industry and how some in that industry have used and or misused intellectual property and, on occasion, violated competition law in order to maintain their competitive position. This site is intended to share much of what I have learned and some of the sources of that information. It is primarily a jumping off point, although I will continue to add my own original content from time to time. Any original content I post is available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to redistribute it. If you are looking for my blog , Walking With Elephants - The Guy With The Shovel, it's not here. You can find that at http://walkingwithelephants.blogspot.com/ . About the title Walking With Elephants I first became familiar with computers forty years ago. Then I began using them to develop models, writing my own software in Fortran. I was thrilled the first time I actually got to use a desktop machine (it was no PC), and even happier when I got my first Commodore. When commercial software became available, I quit writing my own and began using what was availble. Along the way I became a lawyer, and I ended up working at Red Hat. Red Hat wasn't a big software company when I joined, but it became much bigger. Despite that, I always felt we were in an industry full of elephants, and those elephants were always leaving piles of dung to be cleaned up. Thus, the title Walking Wtih Elephants, and by the way, I became The Guy with the Shovel (see blog). |
Mark Webbink has written and spoken extensively on the subjects of open source software, software patents, and patent reform, including testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, and the National Academy of Sciences. Webbink has had articles published by the Queensland University of Technology, the Duke Law and Technology Review, Internet Law & Business, and New South Wales Society for Computers and the Law. Webbink's article “Understanding Open Source Software” has been reprinted around the world as a primer on open source licensing. From 2005 to 2007 Webbink contributed the On the Docket column in Linux Magazine. |
