The Linux Foundation Hosts Spring Legal Summit

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – The Linux Foundation has 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.

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 legal team of Karen Copenhaver and Andy Updegrove.

"The Legal Summits are an important component of the LF 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.

To register, please visit https://www.linux-foundation.org/events/legal.  For companies and organizations interested in attending these member-only events but who are not currently LF members, please contact membership@linuxfoundation.org.