This talk has been presented by Patrice-Emmanuel SCHMITZ, during the 2018 edition with the thematic “Compliance & conformance processes in the time of mainstream Open Source”.

Joinup Licensing Assistant (JLA)

Efforts done for Free/Open licences understanding and classification are precious to support users facing the various open licences for reuse and distribution of software or data (sometimes both). OSI (regarding licences compliant with the OSS principles) and FSF (regarding licenses compliant with the free software freedoms) delivered some information related to the use (OSI) or the compatibility with the GPL (FSF). In the framework of the Linux foundation, the SPDX project produced a standard list of licence names and identifiers, providing access to 348 licence texts. However, there could be a need for a more didactic tool, based on analysing the content of these licences. This is the discussion (more than a final project) that JOINUP, the European Commission site for sharing and reusing interoperable solutions, would like to introduce at EOLE 2018. Comments will be considered for finalising the project, that must be complementary to SPDX and consider various existing approaches like the analysis grids developed by various authors in their books or studies.

About Patrice-Emmanuel SCHMITZ :

Joinup legal expert (IPR / Open source licensing / Personal data protection)

Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz is lawyer, ICT practitioner and freelance (PwC) consultant after being director for European studies at Unisys (Brussels). He is acting as legal expert in the framework of www.JOINUP.eu, the collaborative public sector sharing and reusing website of the European Commission. He authored several studies in the field of intellectual property rights applied to software, the public procurement reform, the best practice contractual clauses in case of software procurement, personal data protection and cloud computing. He coordinated the writing and translation in 23 languages of the European Union Public License (EUPL) that is used by both public and private sector to distribute open source software and various other legal instruments for collaborative working, contractual clauses and data sharing.