I will be presenting a talk at PyCon, "The Absolute Minimum an Open
Source Developer Needs to Know About Intellectual Property." I want to
tailor this talk so that it is interesting to as many attendees as possible.
I am familiar with a lot of the internal divisions in the Free
Software/Open Source community. My intent is not to advocate for or
against any specific position, but rather to promote a common
understanding and address specific situations that developers may
encounter. In other words, a problem/solution approach, instead of an
argumentative approach.
With that in mind, I had in mind the following subjects:
- A brief primer on intellectual property (what are patents, trademarks,
copyrights, and trade secrets?)
- What to do when you have an idea you want to develop, but you are
working for somebody else
- What it means to incorporate GPL'd modules into your own code
- Ways to protect ideas that you have put into a proprietary software
product
- Ways to avoid, work around, or mitigate the effect of software patents
- Licensing, using, and distributing software (comparing and contrasting
the GPL, BSD, and Python licenses)
I am interested in hearing about 1) other topics of interest, and 2) the
relative level of interest in each topic. To keep within the time
limits for my talk, I intend to address the most popular topics in
roughly the order of their popularity.
Thanks,
Van Lindberg
