Whose Code Is It Anyway? (Panel discussion)

November 2, 2:15 PM–2:40 PM (PST) • Room 1

An AI writes fifty lines of code. Who owns them? What happens when a model reproduces licensed code without attribution? What does a CLA mean when a model wrote most of the patch? Lawyers and foundation representatives judge hypothetical contributions where licensing gets ugly, and hash out the ambiguities.

Heather Meeker is the co-founder of Chinstrap Community, a forum for building commercial open source software businesses. She was a founding partner at OSS Capital, an early stage venture capital fund specializing in commercial open source development. She is also a partner at Tech Law Partners, LLP, www.techlawpartners.com, a law firm focused on technology transactions.

Meeker is an internationally-known specialist in open source software licensing. Her new book, From Project to Profit, is a handbook for structuring commercial open source software businesses. Her book Open Source for Business, now in its third edition, is a definitive handbook for lawyers, engineers, and businesspersons on open source licensing in business.

In 2019, Meeker was named by Business Insider as one of the ten people transforming the way the technology industry does business, along with the CEOs of Salesforce, Stripe, and Microsoft. She was the only lawyer on this list.