Profoss — A new approach to licensing

Last week we had another Profoss-event in Brussels. As always, it was a high-quality event, with very interesting speakers and a nice group discussion at the end. It’s really a pity there’s never more than 20 people showing up. A topic such as the legal matters concerning Open Source software definitely should interest more people. Profoss has a lot more potential!

The first speaker, Ywein Van den Brande showed his expertise again by explaining the most important elements of GPLv3 compliancy. Isn’t it great there are lawyers out there knowing the difference between static and dynamic linking? :-)

I also very much enjoyed the talk of Philippe Laurent about the EUPL. The most important thing to remember here is the political value of this license: Europe is really going for Open Source here! Never forget the GPL was crafted for the American jurisdiction. It’s translations are always unofficial, which forms an additional problem for countries as France, where companies have to, by law, have all their legal documents interrelating them with other French companies in the French language. Also, terms as “distribution” have different meanings in the US and Europe, not to mention the various interpretations of the individual European member states.

I’m very happy I finally could attend a talk by Bruno Lowagie. I found him a very gifted speaker; he knew how to entertain and greatly inform the audience at the same time. Since he once called me “probably the youngest one on my list of favourite Flemish entrepreneurs”, I’m a big fan of his. ;-) In the context of this Profoss-event, the sharing of his experiences with the iText IP review were invaluable!

The other speakers, unfortunately, weren’t all that interesting to me. I was especially bothered by their lack of fluency in English (I blogged about this before). I really appreciate speakers coming over from as far as France and Luxembourg, but everyone should feel free to present in their native tongue. I’m sure they had a very nice message for the audience, and feel sorry that so much got lost in translation.

Anyway, it was a great afternoon spent in Brussels again. Congratulations to Raphaël Bauduin for the organisation. I’m looking forward to the next edition again, and feel proud Zeropoint.IT is an official partner of the Profoss-event!