I am following the legal track at the OSCB. And I am surprised by the much higher quality of the presentations by the presenting lawyers here at what is a business conference mostly for attendees without a legal background than the presentations on open source legal issues at for instance the ITECHLAW conference in Prague last november 2006. Admittedly the legal presentations at this OSBC is also remarkably better than those at the first OSBC Europe last summer.

For the first time in my experience the presentations have been very focused on particular relevant issue and actually going in to depths with respect to the topics. Until now those previous presentations that I have heard have always involved presenters that felt the need to really give the audience the very basics on open source software and its licenses, either because the presenters assume that this was the level of information that the audience was able to understand or because they themselves had simply not gone beyond that level. I am afraid that the latter was the case in most situations.

Today at the first day of OSBC I was particularly impressed by the presentation by Stephen Gillespie of Fenwick West on The Scope of Reciprocity/Copyleft Under GPL v3.

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