The First FOSDEM Legal Issues DevRoom

For FOSDEM 2012, held last weekend in Brussels, I had the privilege of co-organizing (with Tom Marble, Karen Sandler, and Bradley Kuhn) the first-ever DevRoom track devoted to discussion of legal issues relating to free/libre/open source software. With several thousand attendees and hundreds of sessions, FOSDEM is one of the largest FLOSS conferences in the world, and surely the largest in Europe. This makes it all the more remarkable that FOSDEM is a free-admission, non-commercial community event, organized and administered entirely by volunteers.

The idea of a Legal DevRoom being untested, FOSDEM's organizers gave us a single day and a relatively small room. Our basic goal was to distinguish our track from similar ones at other FLOSS conferences, by avoiding introductory material and focusing exclusively on advanced legal and related policy topics. We were pleasantly surprised to have received so many good talk proposals. As it turned out, our 75-person room was filled to capacity for nearly all the talks, and I am told that typically as many as 20 people had to be turned away from individual sessions.

The DevRoom opened with a presentation by Philippe Laurent on how various European courts have dealt with open source and open content licenses in specific cases (a number of which involved audience member Harald Welte as plaintiff)...