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!