As corporate buyers get more comfortable with Open Source business models, the stakes are getting higher and the game more and more sophisticated. This is the kind of environment where lawyers thrive, especially in the United States, a place were litigation is next to baseball on the list of favorite passtimes. If copyrights, licenses, patents and trademarks play any part in your business, you need a good lawyer, and in the Open Source world, Mark Radcliffe from DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary is one you should talk to.

I met with Mark yesterday and we discussed about issues such as donations to Open Source communities, due diligence processes for the acquisition of Open Source companies, and the role of patents as assets and tools for supporting both defense and offense strategies. We also speculated on what Intellectual Ventures might be up to, and the kind of threat it poses to the Open Source ecosystem at large. $250M of Microsoft money given to a smart guy like Nathan Myrvold in order to buy the patents of dead start-ups that could be used against Open Source companies sure sounds like a scary scenario. Even more so when you know that an other $150M were later added by three other investors. This makes me wonder if IBM’s Venture in Collaboration Licensing Program featured by Dawn Kawamoto in a recent CNET article should not be used by most Open Source start-ups as a must-have insurance policy.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Free Software Foundation is polishing the draft for GPLv3, which will be released next week during a conference organized at the MIT. Different shores, different views of the world. Fascinating!