Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director at the Open Source Initiative, joined us to explain what is happening around the Open Source Definition, AI and more.
Maximizing the Opportunity While Managing the Risks
Generative AI (GAI) provides powerful opportunities for innovation and productivity across all organizational functions – from composing emails and crafting press releases to retouching and refining images and video, all this in seconds. GAI tools can even be used to write, test and improve computer code! This comes with risks that need to be managed within your organization, in order to realize the competitive advantage these GAI tools can provide.
In this webinar, Anthony Decicco and Wael Nackasha, attorneys at GTC Law Group:
Provide an introduction to GAI and its use to generate software code, text, and images
Explain how machines learn, including training data and the resulting models
Cover how developers are using GAI tools (such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT) to write and augment source code, with a focus on:
Tony is a member in GTC’s IP Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Business & Technology Transactions groups. He focuses on mergers and acquisitions, strategic development of patent portfolios, valuing and commercializing intellectual property assets, and licensing and other technology-related transactions. In addition, Tony founded and oversees the firm’s Open Source Compliance and Due Diligence practice and has extensive experience advising clients regarding the use of open source software. He has reviewed the results of literally thousands of code scans.
Tony is also the Co-Lead of GTC’s Artificial Intelligence practice and has counseled clients regarding traditional AI/ML (i.e. algorithmic/rules-based) for many years and has more recently focused on generative AI. He specializes in data set licensing and strategies for acquiring and collecting data, developing patent portfolios focused on AI inventions and applications of AI technologies, developing AI-related contract terms, risk assessment and mitigation, and related policies and guidelines, in respect of using AI to generate and test software code and the intersections between open source software and AI. Tony is the co-chair of the AI & Cloud Computing sector of the Licensing Executives Society.
Tony’s clients range from individual inventors to Fortune 100 companies. Given his extensive experience on both the buy and sell sides of mergers and acquisitions, patent purchases/sales and IP/technology licensing transactions, he is a trusted advisor to clients on all sides of the table. For acquirers, a key strength is his ability to leverage this experience to quickly identify and assess IP-related risks. On the sell side, this experience translates to grooming clients and positioning IP assets to maximize value and minimize issues during rigorous due diligence.
Prior to joining GTC, Tony was a member of the IP & Technology, Internet & E-Commerce and M&A practice groups at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He has research and professional experience in a diverse range of fields, including patent valuation, law and economics, molecular evolution, apoptosis, and lipid biochemistry. Tony holds an Honors B.Sc. in Biochemistry from McMaster University, an M.A. in Economics and a J.D., both from the University of Toronto, where he was a law review editor. He is admitted to practice in Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, and before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (with Limited Recognition).
Wael Louis Nackasha
Wael focuses on M&A due diligence and technology-related transactional matters. Wael specializes in open source software licenses, commercial licenses, strategic and commercially-sensitive NDAs, and IP strategy advice. Wael also has deep technical knowledge in machine learning. Before joining GTC, Wael was an Associate at Ridout and Maybee LLP where he drafted and prosecuted patents for various technologies, including electrical, machine learning, blockchain, telecommunication, and computer-related technology, before both the USPTO and CIPO.
Before becoming a technology attorney, Wael was a research scientist and software programmer for several years. He published scientific papers in conferences and journals in machine learning, biometrics, computer vision, signal and image processing, and statistical signal processing. Wael holds a J.D. from Osgoode Hall Law School, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto with a dissertation focused on artificial intelligence.
During our recent OpenChain Automotive Event we had some excellent talks. One that we decided to pull out of the main recording and release solo is ‘Complexities of Open Source in Automotive’ by Russ Eling. This type of high level overview is an excellent starting point for people in complex manufacturing industries that want to use our open source standards for licensing and security.
About Russ and OSS Consultants
OSS Consultants is an official OpenChain Partner with decades of experience. Russ at OSS Consultants has offered his time to speak with anyone that has questions about managing use of open source – even if it is as simple as how to get started on your open source journey. Simply send an email to info@ossconsultants.com to schedule a time.
This webinar highlights a new open source tool for open source compliance and security that originates in China. This tool was created by a company called XMIRROR. The open source CLI offers SPDX support, so is immediate interest to tooling communities around the world, particularly from the perspective of integration with open source tooling frontend solutions.
This webinar features an update on ClearlyDefined by Nick Vidal at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). A lot has happened since we last covered this project for open source metadata, including the move to a new home at OSI.
About The Project
ClearlyDefined and its parent organization, the Open Source Initiative, are on a mission to help FOSS projects thrive by being clearly defined. Lack of clarity around licenses and security vulnerabilities reduces engagement – that means fewer users, fewer contributors and a smaller community.
As such, the goals of the project are to:
Raise awareness about this challenge within FOSS project teams
Automatically harvest data from projects
Make it easy for anyone to contribute missing information
Crowd-source the curation of these contributions
Feed curated contributions back to the original projects
This webinar features Alexios Zavras, Chief Open Source Compliance Officer at Intel Corporation and a long-term friend and collaborator around the OpenChain Project. This time the topic was SPDX 3.0, a significant generational update to SPDX, a sister standard to OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 and OpenChain ISO/IEC DIS 18974.
SPDX is a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) specification, so it operates one layer down from the fundamental processes outlined by OpenChain’s standards, and it provides an excellent way to meet our requirements for an SBOM to be used by companies. The second generation of SPDX has been an ISO/IEC standard for two years as ISO/IEC 5962. The third generation shows interesting promise as a way to manage license compliance, security and more.
This OpenChain Webinar features an overview of GPLv2 licensing fragmentation based on research initiated by Philippe Ombredanne of NexB and continued by Armijn Hemel of Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions. The key takeaway is that a significant number of variations exist (40 “vanilla” copies from the FSF or GNU website, 12 with the Linux kernel linking exception in the Linux kernel), but the impact of these variations is nuanced. The requirements do not change but the variability may throw errors for automation and review. Process awareness is required.
This OpenChain Webinar features OSSelot, an open source curation database recently launched by OSADL in Germany. This project addresses one of the most requested features around open source automation for open source compliance: an open, public database supporting SBOM (via SPDX ISO/IEC 5962) for common software packages. This could be a game-changer.
This webinar covers FOSSLight, a new open source project for open source license compliance from the Korean community. This is a quiet landmark for the OpenChain Project: our first non-English global webinar is presented in Korean with Simplified Chinese and Japanese subtitles.
There is one request that comes with this webinar: if you are interested in FOSSlight please considering helping to translate it into more languages.