Event details

An Open Source License Compendium, freely published by Deutsche Telekom AG

von Karsten Reincke (Deutsche Telekom AG / Products & Innovation), Greg Sharpe (Deutsche Telekom)

Thursday, 24.05.2012, Berlin I, 15:00-15:30 Uhr

The right to use Open Source Software is granted by meeting of the respective Open Source licenses. This is a particular challenge for large companies, for several reasons:

Firstly there are many different Open Source licenses. Secondly these licenses each have different obligations. Thirdly these obligations depend on different conditions and circumstances such as systemic or architectural aspects, aspects of usage, how they are combined, and so on. And fourthly, because large companies are likely using more Open Source Software packages than small companies or individual developers, they have to invest more resources into the task of fulfilling the licenses correctly.

There is much information concerning Open Source available. Unfortunately there are not any materials describing concretely what one has to do for using a specific Open Source Software in a specific situation correctly. There is a need to have very reliable and quickly accessible instructions about fulfilling the obligations of a particular Open Source License. Such an Open Source License Compendium should consolidate reliable background knowledge, should offer an easy to use ‘finder’ and should offer a something like to-do-lists which are simply doable.

Deutsche Telekom AG has already started to work on such an Open Source License Compendium. This OSLiC will be published under the Creative Commons License Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany. Moreover DTAG wants to develop this OSLiC together with the community using the methods of Open Source Development: release early , release often. This common work will be started at CeBIT 2012.

The lecture, which we want to offer to the Linux-Days 2012, shall recapitulate the intention of this Open Source License Compendium and the method of development. And it shall report the state of the cooperation between Deutsche Telekom AG and the Open Source Community concerning this OSLiC.

This lecture / paper will be given / written by Greg Sharpe and Karsten Reincke

Über den Autor Karsten Reincke:

Karsten Reincke has studied German Philology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Music, finally added by supplementary studies in Computer Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. From the late 80s on K. Reincke has been working as software developer, firstly as Atari specialist (C/Pascal), then as GNU/Linux expert (C++, PHP, Perl). From the late 90s on he has also been working as IT project manager.

Since 2003 he is employee of Deutsche Telekom AG working as an IT system specialist and as a PMI certified project manager. As Senior Expert he was the initiator of the first Open Source Project published by the Telekom. Today he is a leading member of the DTAG internal Open Source Review Board.

His private life is also shaped by Open Source: he uses GNU/Linux machines and is publishing and maintaining Open Source software.

Über den Autor Greg Sharpe: