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Just a reminder, these posts are not legal advice. This site is the personal blog of Mark Radcliffe and the opinions expressed are those of Mark Radcliffe and not those of his clients, DLA Piper or the clients of DLA Piper.

About Me:

Mark Radcliffe

I have been practicing law in Silicon Valley for over thirty years assisting startups and global companies develop and market innovative products and services. I have participated in multiple business cyles in Silicon Valley from hardware to software to internet to cloud. My projects have included developing the dual licensing business model for open source startup, developing the original domain dispute resolution policy for NSI and assisting Sun in open sourcing the Solaris operating system. Recently, I served on the US Japan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council (one of ten members) to develop a plan to encourage the innovation in Japan and the United States. I have been working with the same attorneys since 1986 although we have merged with other law firms several times. I am now a partner at DLA Piper, a (relatively) new global law firm formed in 2005 from the merger of three law firms. The firm now has 4200 lawyers in 31 countries and 77 cities. My experience in corporate securities (particularly venture capital) and intellectual property enables me to assist companies structure the financing and intellectual property strategy for developing ane exploiting a new product or service. I and my team work with fifty startups at one time as well as Global Fortune 100. I have been fortunate enough to work with companies in software, cloud computing, semiconductor, health care IT and Web 2.0.

Red Hat Launches New Website For Collaboration: Thumbs Up

22/02/10

Red Hat has launched “Opensource.com” as the town square for the “open source” community http://opensource.com/should-be/10/1/welcome-conversation-opensourcecom. It provides for a single location to discuss the legal, social and economic consequences of the open source model. This site comes at an inflection point for the FOSS community: FOSS is now ubiquitous and many of the earlier battles for credibility and acceptance are won. Yet, with those victories, the FOSS community finds itself facing new challenges, such as how to deal with managing the numerous modules of open source in many products in a consistent manner (the so called “Bill of Materials” problem) and the continuing problem of dealing with patents http://opensource.com/law/10/2/looking-out-bilski-software-patents-v-foss. And open source is now being viewed as a model for collaboration beyond software http://opensource.com/business/10/2/what-could-politicians-learn-open-source-way. These discussions cut across wide variety of topics and have been spread out across many sites and blogs.  

Opensource.com provides a forum to discuss these topics in one place and the opportunity to collaborate in the best tradition of the FOSS community. However, the site will only be valuable if it is used by the community. Red Hat has done the community a great favor and provided the platform, but now the community needs to step up and participate in the discussion. Let’s get to it!

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1 Comment

  1. [...] in a name? Mark Radcliffe, in his recent post on his Law & Life: Silicon Valley blog, gave a “thumbs up” to Red Hat for its http://www.opensource.com initiative.  While I [...]

    Pingback by What’s in a name? « commons re:source — February 23, 2010 @ 8:27 am

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