[FOSDEM] FOSDEM 2014 Legal Issues DevRoom Call For Participation

[Tom Marble]

FOSDEM 2014
Legal Issues Devroom CFP

This is the Call for Participation in the FOSDEM 2014 Legal Issues DevRoom

General information
-------------------

FOSDEM [0], the Free and Open source Software Developers' European
Meeting, is a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event organized
each February in Brussels, Belgium.  It is highly developer-oriented
and brings together 5000+ participants from all over the world. This year
FOSDEM will take place on February 1st and 2nd 2014.


Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom
-------------------------------

This Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom is designed to cover topics of
Free Software and Open Source legal and governance policy. While
proposals for introductory topics in this area are welcome, we are
specifically seeking proposals on advanced topics in Free Software
and/or Open Source policy, copyright, trademark, patent and other
legal and governance topics of direct relevance to Free Software and
Open Source developers.

For more background on the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom, and to get
a good sense of the breadth of topics considered appropriate, please
check out the talks from previous years [1] [2] many of which have
been published on the Free as in Freedom oggcast [3].


Call for Participation
----------------------------

The goal for this DevRoom is to foster in-depth discussion about
complex policy, legal and licensing issues that face the software
freedom community today.

Proposals are sought for talks, panel discussions, and guided
discussion groups that can investigate these sorts of issues. Being a
lawyer is not a requirement for submitting a proposal. Being a
"leader" of a FLOSS project or organization is also not a
requirement. We wish to promote speaker diversity and in particular
strongly encourage women to submit proposals!

Example topics might include:
- Copyleft vs. permissive licensing: What is a policy case for copyleft?
  If so what form should it take?
- How is software freedom important in ensuring privacy and security?
- What defines a Free Software and/or Open Source project?
- Do traditional Free Software values face some level of cooption
  from for-profit corporate interest?  If so, how?
- Copyleft licensing models and how they relate to business models.
  Are there some business models that are license-permissible but bad for
  community building? On the other side, does your license choice limit
  or expand your community?
- Eroding software freedom in the proliferation of closed computing devices
  such as mobile phones and tablets
- Copyleft enforcement and compliance planning from a developer perspective.
  What is the future of GPL enforcement? Is it working?
- What is its impact on adoption of copyleft?
- How does the 'so-called' software patent war impact Free Software and Open Source?
- Copyleft license compatibility. What are the challenges of code base merges
  when various licenses are in use? How does a compatibility analysis between licenses work?


Timeline
------------

2013-11-03: CFP open
2013-12-01: CFP deadline
2013-12-15: Speakers notified
2013-12-30: Agenda published on FOSDEM site


Submitting a Proposal
------------------------------

You may submit a 25 minute or 50 minute talk proposal. The committee
may suggest an alternate duration or propose combining similar talks
into a panel.

It is quite likely that the talks in the Legal and Poicy Issues
DevRoom will be audio and video recorded.  By submitting a proposal
you agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.

FOSDEM is asking potential speakers to use Pentabarf for submissions
this year. While we encourage this, we recognize that Pentabarf may be
difficult to use and so we will also or additionally accept proposals
emailed to [5]. Proposals thus emailed must be submitted in plain text
format (and include an short biography).

Here's what you need to do to submit a talk using Pentabarf:
- Go to Pentabarf [4]
- Select FOSDEM 2014
- Follow the instructions to submit a talk
- Select "Legal issues devroom" as the "Track".
- Select “Lecture” as “Event Type”
- In the “General” tab please list a brief abstract listing your name (and the name(s) of any additional speaker(s).  Please fill in the “Full Description”
- Add any links as appropriate in the “Links” tab
- be sure to click “Save” on the lower right!
- Please have each speaker login and add a brief bio in the “Description” section of their “Person” page.
- be sure to click “Save” on the lower right!


Resources
--------------

[0] http://fosdem.org
[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/legal_issues_devroom.html
[2] https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/legal_issues/
[3] http://faif.us
[4] https://penta.fosdem.org/submission
[5] fosdem-legal at faif.us


We look forward to your proposals and discussions in Brussels!
The Legal Issues and Policy DevRoom organizing committee [5]:

- Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation
- Bradley M. Kuhn, President, Software Freedom Conservancy and
  Member of Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation.
- Richard Fontana, Member of Board of Directors, Open Source Initiative, and
  Legal Counsel at Red Hat, Inc.
- Tom Marble, CTO Informatique, Inc.