I can't tell you how many times I have heard people predict the death of open source software over the years. Each time some new tech trend arrives–crypto, source available licensing, SaaS–people predict the death of open source. Lately, people have been predicting the death of open source because of AI code generation, and while some of the facts they cite are undeniable, their conclusions are not supportable.

Every new year is an opportunity to reassess our priorities. This January, I took a hard look at my monthly software subscriptions. They say that the defining characteristic of Baby Boomers is a dozen paid-for but unused app subscriptions. I always like to play against type, and so I’m pretty good at cancelling them, but it still surprised me how much things had changed in only one year.

An article (sorry for the paywall) appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Misuse–Actor plans to use trademarks of himself saying ‘Alright, alright, alright’ and staring at a camera to combat AI fakes in court." The WSJ article said, "McConaughey’s lawyers believe that the threat of a lawsuit in federal courts would help deter misuse more broadly, including for AI video that isn’t explicitly selling anything." It also quoted the lawyer as saying: "I don’t know what a court will say in the end.

Note: This is an article form 2020 whose original link has broken. I've posted it here for continuity. When business is on an upward trajectory, investing is not so hard. After all, the stock market always goes up over the long term. But it takes more work to identify good investments during down markets. Fortunately, commercial open source software (COSS) businesses can be a great investment during bad times.

For a few years now, the news has been full of prognosticators screeching about the dangers of AI. And while some of it is potentially concerning, we all know taht the news tends to lean into the catastrophic. So, I've been thinking about one aspect of the advent of AI that might actually be great – at least for the time being.

I am excited to announce that I filed an amicus brief in this case (about which I wrote a while ago). The case is on interlocutory appeal to the Third Circuit on topics of protectability of legal headnotes under copyright, and fair use of legal headnotes in AI training. My brief is focused on protectability. On a personal note: This is the first time I've ever filed an amicus brief–or any brief–and the process was a learning experience for me.

The PHP project announced it is moving to a new license. PHP is a scripting language used for web development. It can be embedded within HTML and used to create dynamic web pages. It is the "P" in the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)–although some people use the P to refer to Python or PERL. The Zend Engine, the core of PHP.

On the heels of the landmark judgment in favor of Anthropic this week, a judge in another pending AI copyright case, Kadrey v. Meta, ruled for the defendants. Thirteen authors, including most notably Sarah Silverman, sued Meta for using their copyrighted books, downloaded from "shadow libraries," to train its large language model (Llama). The court explained, "A shadow library is an online repository that provides things like books, academic journal articles, music, or films for free download, regardless of whether that media is copyrighted." The most notorious of these is called…

This week, in Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Alsup (Northern District of California) ruled that training AI large language models (LLMs) on lawfully acquired works of authorship is fair use. This is a landmark ruling by the highly respected judge, who handled the Oracle v. Google case. Infringement claims regarding AI come in two basic flavors: that the act of training is infringement, and that the AI producing output similar to the input is infringement.

I'm intrigued as to why an article about cannabis law cites to an article I wrote over thirty years ago about copyright fair use in postmodern art. But the Tulsa Law Review has paywalled their prestigious journal, forcing me to pay if I want to find out, and honestly, I'm not quite that intrigued. By the way, you can download my article for free, and there is even an update here.

Clean room developments are necessary when a developer wants to “cleanse” the intellectual property burden of third party software. The need arises when third party software is provided under unacceptable license terms, or not licensed at all. This is one of the trickiest tasks in software development, but it has a long history of best practices. The canonical clean room development seeks to avoid trade secrets of proprietary software.

Recently, an opinion was published by a magistrate judge in Delaware, Stephanos Bibas, in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, a case filed in 2020 about AI training. For most of us who have been following the spate of ongoing cases about generative AI, this case was not too high on the radar, because it's about regular AI: substantive number crunching.

Join FOSSA to celebrate the release of the newest edition of Heather Meeker’s go-to guide on OSS license compliance.

A new opinion from the 9th Circuit, filed December 16, 2024, may change the way we think about copyleft licensing. It's rare for the courts to opine on what constitutes a derivative work under copyright law, even less so for software. The interpretation of copyleft licenses–GPL and AGPL in particular–turn heavily on the notion that integrating code creates a derivative work.

This week, there was some interesting movement in one of the many copyright claims relating to AI. Anthropic, the maker of Claude (my personal favorite AI for coding!) reached an agreement to settle parts of an ongoing lawsuit, Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic, filed October 18, 2023. The case has a long list of music publishers as plaintiffs.

On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…

From Project to Profit: How to Build a Business Around Your Open Source Project - Kindle edition by Meeker, Heather. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use feat...