Andrew Katz
With over 30 years’ experience in the technology field, Andrew is a leading free and open-source software lawyer. He regularly advises clients on technology law, computer software licensing and distribution, open source licensing, business structures and compliance, open hardware licensing, open data, the legal aspects of AI, and particularly IP and regulatory aspects of large language models.
Andrew’s clients range across the spectrum of startups to multinationals and he also advises foundations, public sector bodies, academic institutions and trans-national bodies.
Andrew is a Fellow of both the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Open Forum Academy, and for seven years held the post of visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, where he taught postgraduates free and open source software law. He is co-author of Open Source Law, Policy and Practice published by Oxford University Press in 2022, as well as a number of other books and papers on open source law and technology law. He is currently a visiting researcher on standards and open source at the University of Skövde, Sweden.
He has also recently launched an initiative to manage risk in the open source and AI software supply chains, through the structures of process, procedure and insurance.
Practice Area
Panel
- Contributing Author
Membership
- Founder Editor: Journal of Open Law, Technology and Society
- Project Lead: Eclipse Corinthian
1 Contributions by Andrew Katz
PRACTICE NOTES
Free and Open Source Software: UK Legal and Commercial Guide to Licensing, Copyleft, SaaS, Linking, Incorporation, Compliance, Due Diligence, SBOMs, Patents, Trade Marks and Enforcement
This Practice Note considers the following commercial and legal issues arising from the use of free and open source software:
What is free and open source software?
History
Upstreaming and forking
Free and open source licences
Distribution of modified works (and the reciprocal effect)
Linking and incorporation
Software as a service (SaaS)
Compliance requirements
Licence incompatibility
Bare licence or contractual licence
Patents
Trade marks
Corporate transactions
Software bill of materials
Software licensing to the end user
Enforcement
Free and open source software (sometimes called ‘FOSS’) is a collective term for software released under a licence granting recipients the rights to use, adapt, and share it—whether unchanged or modified—without fees or royalties, with the source code made available. In contrast, the software licences most familiar to lawyers may seek to stop the licensee from accessing source code, using the software across multiple users, locations or computers, and from making and distributing copies. FOSS prioritises freedom over restriction. Although it is provided free of charge (gratis), the...
TMT
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