Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

The history of Open Source provides great examples of hacks to the governance systems the world operates under, the most well known of which is Copyleft, provided you know what to look for. The trick to hacking the legal system is to take some mechanism in law that is apparently designed to work against you, your project, or open source in general and make it work for you instead. This talk will cover, with examples how previous hacks to the governance system have worked. We'll briefly cover copyleft, but then dive into hacks such as the legal basis for the Developer Certificate of Origin. Finally we'll explain how using these techniques, every developer can achieve things like ownership of their own copyrights, and why, from a developer and project perspective, this is important both for representation in the project as well as for the general health of the ecosystem.