Open Source Licensing

Technical Background is Essential for an open source licensing lawyer.

Open source touches almost every piece of software today, but understanding all the licenses and the obligations they impose is a complex task. An experienced open source licensing lawyer is essential to a company's open source compliance and planning.

"Our combination of legal expertise and technical experience is what sets us apart when counseling on Open Source projects."

Our team engages in open source conflict analysis and compliance audits. When risks are identified, we can provide a variety of risk minimization and remediation strategies for the client.

Sometimes, during the diligence phase of an acquisition, a sophisticated purchaser will require an audit of a company's software to understand how much Open Source—and, more importantly, what kind of Open Source—is in the target company's code base. This is no easy task. Kronenberger Rosenfeld open source licensing lawyer Ansel Halliburton is trained as a Black Duck Legal Specialist, can both help manage the Open Source audit process and interpret its results.

Companies also sometimes wish to publish their own projects as open source. There can be many reasons for this, including developer relations, trust and security, and interoperability. We understand these motivations, and can help companies select an appropriate license for projects they wish to open source.

Engineering Background

Ansel worked as a software engineer before law school, and has been contributing to open source projects for more than a decade. He contributed the Mechanical Turk module to Boto, the reference implementation of Amazon Web Services for Python. His own code is on GitHub.

To discuss your open source software matter, call Kronenberger Rosenfeld at 415-955-1155, ext. 120, or submit your matter to us now using our online case submission form.