MediaTech Law

By MIRSKY & COMPANY, PLLC

The Weird World of Open Source Software Licenses

Posted September 15, 2017 by Dylan Gilbert 0

I like to think that somewhere in America, at this very moment, a college kid has just agreed without reservation to accept five bucks from his friend to drink an entire bottle of hot sauce. Non-lawyers are often surprised to learn that, public policy concerns aside, such an agreement contains all the elements necessary to create a legally binding contract: Offer, acceptance and consideration.

Part of a lawyer’s job is to identify relevant legal issues lurking beneath factual scenarios. Issue spotting can be frustratingly difficult, however, because, as the absurd hot sauce agreement illustrates, the law is often counterintuitive. Counter-intuitions abound in the weird world of open source license agreements. License agreements have become commonplace in our tech-saturated lives. If you’re not sure what they are, jog your memory to the last time you downloaded an app for your laptop or smartphone. Remember being asked to read and agree to an endless list of terms and conditions? That contract that you “read” and agreed to was almost certainly an end user license agreement to use the app for a specific purpose.

Over the past twenty years or so, several copyright licensing movements have gained traction. In general, these new types of licenses challenge traditional notions of copyright protection by granting licensees the right to modify the original copyrighted material for future use free of charge so long as certain promises are kept and/or conditions are met.

One well-known movement is the Open Source Initiative, which reviews and approves open source software (OSS) licenses. OSS licenses typically provide licensees with the right to access the source code of the original software program (hence “open” source) and create new software programs subject to the terms of the license.

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Legal Considerations of Agile Development

Posted September 6, 2017 by Rob Ellis 0

An interesting change has occurred across software development projects over the past several years, which has seen the practice of Agile software development overtake that of the traditional Waterfall model. Rooted in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, Agile development favors greater interaction between technical and business teams, resulting in a more fluid development lifecycle. That is in comparison to the Waterfall approach, which operates on the basis of clear defined stages and objective within the project.

In the past, with a Waterfall approach, a software development project would be scoped out in full, with every detail and eventuality planned out, and with a completion date identified. So when asked “When is the project launching?”, a project manager or stakeholder would confidently reply with a set date, possibly months or years into the future.

With Agile development, the understanding is that not every detail can be mapped out, and requirements may change as the project advances. Agile allows for shifting of goals and deliverables as requirements shift during the development lifecycle. For that reason, work is done in small increments – referred to as sprints – with each sprint resulting in some working piece of code or “minimum viable product” (MVP). So when asked “When is the project launching?”, a project manager or stakeholder will likely not have a firm date, and instead reply “We expect a working version of this piece of the project by the end of the next two-week sprint.”

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SaaS: Software License or Service Agreement? Start with Copyright

Posted July 16, 2012 by Andrew Mirsky 0

SaaS, short for “Software as a Service”, is a software delivery model that grants users access to a program while the software itself and its accompanying data are stored off-site, on a vendor’s (or another third party’s) servers.  A user accesses the program via the internet, and the access is provided as a service.  Hence … “Software as a Service”.

In terms of user interface functionality, a SaaS service – typically accessed via a subscription model – is identical to a traditional software model in which a user purchases (or more typically, licenses) a physical copy of the software for installation on and access via the user’s own computer.  And in enterprise structures, the software is installed on an organization’s servers and accessed via dedicated “client” end machines, under one of many client-server setups.  In that sense, SaaS is much like the traditional client-server enterprise model where servers in both cases will likely be offsite, the difference being that SaaS servers are owned and managed by the software owner.  The “cloud” really just refers to the invisibility of the legal and operational relationship of the servers to the end user, since even in traditional client-server structures servers might very likely be offsite and accessed only via internet.

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