Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Richard Willemant, “The Legal Issues Surrounding Free and Open Source Software: Challenges and Solutions for the Government of Québec”, for the Conseil du Trésor du Québec (2005), translated from original in French.
The Government of Québec is slowly but surely turning its attention to the issue of free and open source software in response to the interest shown by Québec’s software industry and the attention paid to the phenomenon by governments around the world.
This openness is easy to understand given an environment in which online service provision to citizens must be enhanced while minimizing expenditures on technology, curtailing service providers’ control over the administration, and promoting the development of the information society in Québec. Nonetheless, as we see in the news, adoption of this new attitude toward to software development is not always immune to legal challenges. Consequently, the manner in which Québec law interacts with free and open source software, as well as the associated risks, assume a particular significance.
The analysis we present here reveals that the law, as it currently stands in Québec, appears adequate to effectively address the various legal issues inherent in the use of free and open source software. First of all, no legal rule seems to be incompatible with the validity of free and open source licences, despite that fact that few of them were designed with the Québec legal system in mind. Moreover, both federal copyright rules and Québec regulations affecting contractual liability allow the authors and users of free and open source software to effectively preserve the freedom of computer code, which is typically the purpose of free and open source licences.
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