The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) has made available the following comprehensive document which serves as a primer to Free software developers. Here is one bit of interest.

The specific topics addressed herein are:

1. copyrights and licensing,
2. organizational structure,
3. patents, and
4. trademarks.

They are presented in this order because that most closely aligns with the life-cycle of the legal needs of a typical FOSS project. When code is written, copyrights immediately come into being. The terms under which the owner of those copyrights allows others to copy, modify and distribute the code determine whether it is considered “free” and/or “open source.” Once a project gains speed, many benefits can be achieved by the creation of an organizational entity for the project that is separate from the project’s individual developers. After successful public release of a project, patent and trademark issues may arise that need attention.

Further analysis comes from Steven Vaughan. Excerpt from the opening paragraph:

On Valentine's Day, the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) published a legal guide, "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects," for open-source developers and organizers.

The timing is interesting, but then again, the FSFE seems to have announced its workshop on legal and licensing matters on the very same day:

FSFE's Freedom Task Force has said that the first European Licensing and Legal Workshop for Free Software will be held on Friday the 11th of April in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The venue for this meeting is the InterContinental Amstel Hotel.

It is abundantly clear that it will get harder to separate legal and technical issues in years to come (let alone ignore the two), especially if you are a software developer. Since I have a degree in Software Engineering myself, I happen to be affected directly. This transition means more jobs to lawyers at the expense of rather creative types, which is a sin in case only the software industry is involved.

The impact of lawyers can be detrimental where art and certain types of sciences are involved because this elevates costs and slows down progress. It is quite not the case with criminal law, which is the roots -- even the 'bread and butter' -- of this largely important occupation. It is usually when law intrudes to leech off of other people's hard work that the fine ethical and pragmatic boundary gets crossed.⬆