2025-09-28 –, Auditorium B032 (80)
As the FSF's licensing and compliance manager, I will address licensing-related questions from the maintainers and developers of the toolchain projects. This will be an informal, interactive exchange about the topics collected through RFCs before GNU Cauldron but you are welcome to ask a question during the session as well. It will also be an opportunity to learn about FSF's Licensing and Compliance Lab recent work. We plan to cover topics such as LLM-generated contributions to GNU, following notice and attribution requirements, and GPL compliance in different technical setups.
One of the FSF's Licensing and Compliance Lab's priorities is to support the GNU Project in any licensing-related challenges, collecting copyright assignments and copyright maintenance, as well as working with identified GPL violations to ensure software freedom in GNU programs is respected by distributors. You can always send us a question at licensing@fsf.org but we would love to use every possible opportunity to meet and talk in person.
This proposed session for the FSF licensing BoF at Cauldron will help us to get to know each other better and understand what are the best ways to be of help to the GNU Project's developers. We have reached out to the maintainers and developers of the toolchain projects with RFCs, and already received some suggestions of topics to cover during this BoF, like: Licensing challenges in accepting LLM-generated source code; Practical approach to observing notice and attribution requirement in licenses of preexisting code used in GNU programs; and GPL compliance in the context of software containers. All pertinent topics we look forward to addressing and openly discussing at GNU Cauldron. People can send us more suggestions until the Cauldron and if time permits, we are also prepared to brief you about the Lab's recent work, in particular in the GPL stewardship and compliance area.
Krzysztof (Chris) is the Free Software Foundation's licensing and compliance manager. He holds a doctorate in legal studies from Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands, for a thesis which discussed the optimal framework for the protection of software freedom. His experience includes practicing law in Poland, advocating, and educating in the area of free and permissive licensing in various projects carried out by NGOs, educational, academic, and cultural institutions from Poland and other EU member states. Krzysztof also worked as a project coordinator, including in software development.