The Software Freedom Law Center — champions of all things Open Source — has become a legend within the Open Source community over the past year through the nearly a dozen lawsuits filed on behalf of the developers of BusyBox against a laundry list of companies that refused to comply with the GPL. Now, they're taking the fight out of the courtroom and into the boardroom with a new guide aimed at educating managers about the requirements inherent in using Open Source software. Co-written by SFLC team members Bradley Kuhn, Aaron Williamson, and Karen Sandler, the guide offers advice for executives on the obligatiosn imposed by the GPL, as well as practices companies can put in place to prevent violations in the first place.

The guide is available from the SFLC's website as HTML, PDF, and Postscript, and is freely available for (verbatim) copying. (It is presumably also available under the CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 license indicated at the bottom of every page on the SFLC site.) Most of all, companies should remember the number one piece of GPL-compliance advice: If the SFLC calls, listen.

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Justin Ryan is the News Editor for Linux Journal.
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