Legal Complexities, Open Source Code

[plantarum]

This is not a risk, this is a requirement. Our legal staff need to understand OSS licenses. That's their job, just as it's their job to understand plant breeder's rights, or patent law, or anything else. We shouldn't be presenting this as if it were categorically different from issues that lawyers are expected to deal with.

[mgifford]

Having a clear public statement from Justice would make sense to me. Not sure who government legal staff generally defer to. It needs to be something that is easy to get to via Google & that is easy enough to understand that you don't need to be a lawyer to do so.

[Acasovan]

I've reached out to colleagues at DOJ to discuss this issue. This will get added to the comms section. Having spoken with several other colleagues, the issue related to using open tools (not just software) goes beyond our legal team, but they are a great groups to start with. A couple of years ago, we did an Open Gov 101 with the legals team leads for each department, we can organize the same type of thing!

That said, we need to focus on finishing the paper (with the help of legal) before we can communicate! So this will come, just can't promise that it will be the next step.