Understanding Open Source Law and AI Impacts in Modern Software Development

Anne Bovelett:
Hello everyone, my name is Ann Bovelett and today I’m hosting this episode on Open Channels FM with a very special guest, a well known lawyer in the atmosphere of Open Source, Carlo Piana from Italy. Stay tuned because there are some interesting things going to fly by. For example, one of the trendsetting court cases that he won for an open source company in Italy, very well known in the WordPress space. I’m going to leave the details to Carlos and some of you may know that he has given a fantastic talk at WordCamp Europe in Turino in 2024. And Carlo is an IT lawyer, open source advocate and he’s a board member of the Open Source initiative. Welcome Carlo. I’m so happy that you’re here. I was impressed when I first learned about you. I learned about you through Giovanni Cintolo, the owner of Ovation Srl when he decided to take people who stole his code without attribution to court. If I’m right, that started in 2021 and that’s the case that he won. We’ll be talking about it later, but there are a few things that really inspired me when I saw you have your own Wikipedia page. And in this day and age everyone is trying to get a Wikipedia page, of course, because they want to be cited by AI Dutch of man later. But you’ve really earned that page. I’ve. I’ve seen it. So I see that you have been involved in some of the cornerstone legal cases in Europe, like the antitrust battle between the EU Commission and, and Microsoft. So for anyone listening and anyone here creating open source software or using open source software, really you want to stay tuned. So Carlos, I actually have a million questions for you, but one of the first is how did you even get into Open Source? What made it that you are so passionate that you decided to take up the legal ax and go to battle for all of us?

Carlo Piana:
Well, I’m passionate about technology, which for an Italian lawyer is not very common. So I was much into studying how to do things better and I was in a, so to speak, entire Microsoft camp. And also because my firm at the time was taking a firm stance against using Microsoft tools. And when I left I tried to find something else to run my own stuff and I was exposed to Linux in 1996. That was interesting. But yeah, just curiosity. I started in 2000 with a mandrake Linux to start using some non Microsoft stuff. Of course Mac was not there yet and all this as a lawyer I was curious about this long legal language which didn’t seem like a legal language was a new GPL. I say, oh, this thing, free software. I remember, I’ve heard about it. So some guys in Massachusetts doing free stuff. I said no, that’s rubbish. Of course software needs a lot of investment, a lot of money and people doing free stuff cannot exist. But I was curious and so I learned about it and starting studying it and it fascinated me. So I started writing about it from a legal standpoint, started attending meetings, some or these underground meetings of people doing this strange open source stuff. There were a couple of person, very high level in the Linux or Free Software environment. And so I got involved. But the boom of my involvement began when the Microsoft decision in the antitrust decision was published and it was announced on the radio that the Microsoft was going to appeal. I said I have some experience in antitrust, I have some experience in law, I can help you somehow. And I was kind of understatement because I was sucked in almost literally. And I started doing this very huge litigation with high profile lawyers and I. So I had to, to gear up my, my understanding and of, of all the legal and social and technical stuff around Open Source. And it never stops ever since became general counsel to the Free Software foundation Europe for 10 years and then I was elected board member and I became chair of the Open Source Initiative, which is the entity, the initiative that defines what is Open Source and what is not open source. So it’s. And now I’m still currently member of the Open Source Initiative, the board member of the OSI and a member of the licensing committee, which is a committee deciding which license can be approved as an Open Source license and which cannot be.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, this is, I mean to people who are not so deeply into legal, I’m one of them, that licensing feels like a jungle, right? So for example, one of the things I learned about when I was talking to the sole maintainer of the PHP code sniffer, Juliette Reinders Folmer, she explained to me that if they wanted to change certain things in the licensing, they would have to get permission from any soul that ever worked on it. And it’s one of the reasons why they are not using AI in working on their tool because they simply can’t because of copyright. So people, if you’re interested in that, go listen because that is really, really interesting stuff. Or I think someone proposed something while when Cloudflare came up, did you follow that? When the guys behind Cloudflare decided to quickly build a CMS like okay, let’s do something better than WordPress.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah, I’ve looked into it, but I’m still spending a lot of time in non professional things around open source. And they would have been yet another thing. I’m just sitting back, lying back and watching what the evolution is going to be. But that was really interesting.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, it was interesting. And then also it was another occasion where I heard like okay, someone said. I don’t even recall what it was. Whether someone proposed for. For Gutenberg to be in there or the other way around, I don’t know. But because of licensing this just wasn’t possible. And that’s really interesting what is going on there. But I wonder if people understand how this is actually protecting them and their work.

Carlo Piana:
Okay. People tend not to be involved in the legal licensing issue unless they are forced to. Sometimes they are forced to because there is some gaps they need they need to solve. People just slap the license. They think it’s best but without much thinking only to learn. After that it’s too late to change their mind. Because as you said, especially if you take a strong copy left. I know that’s a very weird thing to say, but especially with some licenses you are required to ask permission from the copy holder, which can be many, many, many, many, many, many, many people. And for Linux for instance Linux the kernel, that would be impossible because you can have hundreds of thousand different copyright holders, many of whom you don’t have a way to reach out. Yeah, they did that. There was a time there was a company named SCO or Scope. They claimed to have copyright on a small portion of Linux and they started a huge litigation which lasted for many, many, many, many years. The Linux decided to redo track the contributions coming from that company which went bankrupt and reformed. But that was a hell of an exercise. So never to be done.

Anne Bovelett:
What a nightmare.

Carlo Piana:
Other guy is called Mac Hardy is a guy seeking money through from infringers of the GNU GPL which is the license under Linux is under. In order to avoid these to be becoming commonplace, some would say trolling. They decided to trace all these contributions and to redo them without removing all the copyright. This guy. Then again that was because there was, there was a lot of problem arising from these legal initiatives.

Anne Bovelett:
This actually puts a question I didn’t realize I had part of a large group of people who have attended the CloudFest hackathon. I don’t know if you heard about it, if you’ve ever been There next year the hackathon is having its 10th anniversary and we have usually about 10 projects, 11 open source projects. And the goal is always they have to be projects that serve the greater good and everything. And one of the questions that no one can answer easily, but maybe you can, is imagine you have built this project in CloudFest, it is successful, you’re going to build a company around it and then the people who were in your project at the table when the project was born, that’s where the license hasn’t even been thought about. I just realized it, it hasn’t been thought about. What would be the way to go about that? For example, you get everyone together and say, listen, we built this together at the Hackathon, we’re going to build a company around it, we’re going to license it with an open source license. And then how would you go about that? I mean, there are many, many more hackathon projects and open source projects where people get together spontaneously.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah, no, no, I actually being in a hackathon, not actually hacking, but being in the process, somehow doing that as an afterthought is a bad idea. You have to plan in advance. The most, probably the easiest way is to say everything you compute is going to be under a very low profile license like MIT or BSD, which permits to, for you to have been attributed the work you have done. But this software can be mingled, so to speak, with other software without creating incompatibilities. Because if you don’t do that, every author is a copyright holder and if you don’t have the permission to use that software, you’re stuck, you cannot do anything.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay. Yeah, so that’s a very, that’s a very clear, clear thing and it’s something we need to talk about. Maybe they have these, these things in place. We just never thought about it.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah, but the easiest thing, easiest way is to say everybody slap an MIT or a BSD license. So if you want to change a license of the overall project, having bits which are MIT or BSD, that would be easier. Of course there is still some compliance to do. But that was very, that would be very, very, very low profile. No, not big deal.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah.

Carlo Piana:
If you start using GPL, probably you must use GPL for the rest of the project’s life.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. So on another topic, you know, to get back to, I remember in 2020 I was speaking to Giovanni Cintello who at that time made a massively important product for people using Elementor. And like so many, there were so many and there are so many Companies building all kinds of add on products for this highly successful page builder. Right. I mean there are millions and millions of site out there based on it. So obviously it’s very lucrative for people to build add ons. And I remember that what happened back then is that suddenly there was a competitor who, who built the exact same product. And I remember seeing that product for the first time and I was like, heh. But that’s exactly what the product from Dynamic was doing, called Dynamic. I have to say it correctly because I haven’t used Elementor in a long time anymore. Sorry. So it was the Dynamic content for Elementor. Right. They took Nerds Farm to court. Those were the guys who did that. And then it felt like a miracle. You won. You represented Ovation SRL and you won that case. And I saw it, I saw the press release, a lot of people saw the press release. I think even the founders of Elementor said something about it online. And to me it felt like you had defeated a mountain. It’s like it gave hope that people don’t just get away with stealing your code. Because what I understand is that if you use source code that someone else created, you have to attribute, you have to say thank you. These people created this, this is what their work. And we are working on that along. So I wonder, in this day and age now with AI, I remember you were talking about AI in Torino, at WordCamp Europe. And just before, as we were talking, you said to me, I know even more now than I knew then. What if someone builds a WordPress product, for example, or another open source product and uses AI to literally take the code from another open source creator and tries to modify that in such a way that it becomes as good as unrecognizable. How does that work in these days? Does it make things more difficult?

Carlo Piana:
This is not a theoretical stuff, this is actually happening now. Now, I don’t remember the name of the library, but there’s a guy redoing a library, so a set of code to be reused in other products and expressly saying, telling to the AI, redo this, making all the functions that are in the library, but without copying any code, which is possible. I mean, it’s something that has been done many times using an approach which is called white room reverse engineering. So you look at the code people define what the code is doing in a very high level and some other without, without watching at all to the source code, rewrite the same functions, and the odds are that you will not do the same code. You compare the Two sets of code and you will see something different. And if you see something which is very, very close, it’s mostly because there’s a, some, some, there’s some constraints. In French it says, means that it’s something you are forced to do and that’s not copyrightable. So in this way you can reproduce something which is functionally equivalent but without being copied. Because of course you can redo the stuff as long as you don’t copy the code, you can redo. You have the right to study the software, what the software does and re do the same stuff. But what you can also is to decompile and to reverse engineer the source code and copy, because that’s not possible. Of course, it’s possible for free software, but you cannot copy. You must redo that. With AI you can do the same. You have more legal challenges because it’s very difficult to say that you have not seen the code because somehow the code is public with open source. But it’s not impossible to think about a way to rewriting without having a copyright issue. Because you can instruct the open source, sorry, the AI to not to reproduce the same. If there are five ways to write the same thing and the originating project was implementing a, you will do E. And that’s, that’s, that’s not impossible because copyright is actually about copying the part which is creative, which is where you have much freedom of writing. So that, that’s the way it’s, if it’s functionally constrained, that’s not copyrightable. So many say, oh, but this is selling on our work because these people are reusing our stuff to create new stuff. But this is actually how open source works. You study and you can reproduce if you can use or can you reproduce if you don’t like it, I mean, and there is no way at present to stop it. I’m probably stopping is not a good idea because I mean, the scope of open source, you’re having more software, better software available to everybody. AI can be away. The real problem of AI coding is that you must have somebody sufficiently senior, sufficiently knowledgeable to tell this is good software, this is bad software. But AI coding rapidly draining the source of new developers who don’t have, who don’t write code. We don’t get experience and get a senior enough to be leading developer. So in a few years you will have very old senior developers and no young senior developer. And that’s a huge problem.

Anne Bovelett:
That’s an incredible danger to our entire industry. That’s, that’s a danger. I Mean, that’s, that’s not just for software. That’s also for AI being used on hardware and everything. It’s, it’s something that deeply, deeply worries me when I think about the future of our children and grandchildren that they’re heading for. And yeah, it’s, it’s. But, you know, that’s probably a topic for another day. And also one of the things I find interesting, and I don’t know how much that that would, would relate to copyright. For example, there are all kinds of MCPs being launched right now. An MCP that creates blocks, also AI tools that creates blocks. I mean, I’m having a field day with the application called Telex from Automattic. You can actually go to Telex Automatic AI Think or, or dot com. I don’t know. I’m not sure I will share the correct link in the show notes. And you could just go there and say, I want a custom Gutenberg block that does this and this and this and this. And then I looked into the information around it and I was like, I don’t see any real information that says, you can’t say that you created this. You have to say that Telex created this. I couldn’t find it. I’m not saying that that isn’t there. I just couldn’t find it. I just thought to myself, whoa, so we’re being given an AI tool that can create stuff and then you can just change it and say, okay, this is, this is. I created this. Whereas I think I didn’t create it. I didn’t create that block. Telex did, but it was my idea. Yeah, right.

Carlo Piana:
Copyright doesn’t protect ideas. Copyright protects the way an idea is expressed, is delivered. So it’s.

Anne Bovelett:
What a beautiful definition. I mean, it couldn’t be any clearer than this.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah, it’s not mine. So I cannot be attributed to that. It’s the standard way of. In a legal environment.

Anne Bovelett:
I come from an artist family and we’ve been robbed and of our copyrights for three generations of musicians, animators and all that. But yeah, that is a very, very beautiful definition.

Carlo Piana:
It works in the reverse. So you have an idea and you use AI to create, to express. This idea is not your expression, is not work of your creativity. And it’s unlikely that per se. I mean, that copyright is attributed to you because it was machine generated. It’s not impossible, as I told you in Torino, and I still stand by that idea. You need to document the, the decisions you have made. Because if you say, just put a prompt and get whatever comes out, that’s definitely not copyrighted. But if you look at the code, if you look at the stuff which has been generated and you say no, this change, you take decisions, you arrange things in order to make decisions and that can be a way to express your creativity. I mean, I am a photographer, an amateur photographer. When photography became a form of art, so to speak, people say no, no, because that’s just say you take pictures, that’s a representation of. But there are a lot of creative decision in making a picture. The angle, the lightning, the lighting, development, whatnot. And that became a form of art in itself. You know, it’s still early, but it’s possible that with a lot of. And by documenting the decision you have made and showing that you have made some contribution, you get copyright over that.

Anne Bovelett:
That’s a very interesting point. So I hope the people listening to this will, will dive deeper into that and find these possibilities because it’s frustrating that ideas can’t be copyrighted. And the thing is we get so incredibly creative now that we have AI. I see people connecting dots that they couldn’t connect before because they were like, oh, I’m not a developer, I can’t, I can’t even begin to, to create this. And I even heard a term that applied very well to someone. He said, I’m not a developer, I’m a context engineer.

Carlo Piana:
It’s, it’s a, it’s a very delicate and more complicated than it would appear discussion to have. I’m not even sure I can have my own opinion formed yet. I have some, some ideas, some, some, some elements of an opinion, but still I’m, I’m still undecided on many, many, many. I mean not on the legal, but more on the philosophical and what would be, be the ideal setting.

Anne Bovelett:
so I was thinking about something else. We get all these tools, these MCP tools. One of the most, well, I would say one of the loudest currently is Novamira AI. They just came up and they give everyone possibilities. For example, they to log on to a prediction environment. Never do this on a live site. I just have to say it. But if you connect it to your live site or to your production, I keep saying that to your staging site. If you connect this to your staging site, there’s all kinds of things you can do, right? You can manage your website. I mean, it feels like the sky is the limit, but you can also ask it to create things like create a widget or create this or create that. And there too, it’s like, okay, so you’re using this tool that someone has built for you and you’re saying, I want to create a widget for Elementor, or I want to have a special widget that uses ACF or whatever. And then you are like, whoa, this widget is so cool. Let’s see if I can distribute that to others saying, I made it.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah. Okay, first of all, novamira is not AI. It’s an element of an AI system which can connect an LLM, a model like Claude or whatever to WordPress. So it’s the missing link that can make these two things interoperate or can.

Anne Bovelett:
Mr. Yeah, I mean, all of these tools are right. So there are several others. And I’m just blanking out right now. One of them was released three, four days ago and they do the same thing. So I’m not saying they do the same as Novamira.

Carlo Piana:
I’m saying there are many elements, many, many, many, many boxes communicate with each other. Some of the other is not Bring your own LLM, we provide you with everything, or we connect you to A, B, C, D and we get revenue for that. There’s a lot of choices. Of course I know, Novamira, because being a. The chair of the project as something the one I know best.

Anne Bovelett:
But I was not aware that you are the chair of this, of this project. Really, I wasn’t.

Carlo Piana:
I’m the chair, which means that I’m not actively involved in making. But I’m, so to speak, I’m in an advisory position because that was one

Anne Bovelett:
of my questions I was about to ask you, like, have you been consulted by them or any other tool you know that says, hey Carlo, we are thinking of building this, can you please tell us if we are doing it the right way legally? And the other question is, should companies be doing that?

Carlo Piana:
And no matter what arrangement you make, this is not made by you, is made by artificial intelligence. You may have provided guidelines, skills, done a lot of prompting engineering. And so you might have some claims of copyright. What. Of course, it’s very difficult to tell exposed. I mean, after this, this thing has been, has been made public that you have created that. You claim that and say created that.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I’m digressing a lot too. So you have to stop me if it gets too wild. But we have this legal, this, this legislation now that you have to say when something has been created with AI. Sure, right. If there has been no human intervention,

Carlo Piana:
actually you have to watermark or to expressly put some statement that this has been created via AI. But what if you don’t? Because one thing is a must, but another thing is will I get caught doing that? It’s stealing is prohibited, but people steal and they get away with that. So it’s the, the problem is how do you enforce how you find out and enforce enforcement? Enforcing is good. I mean, it’s easy, but first you have to find out. And it’s always a game.

Anne Bovelett:
It’s the same thing with the European Accessibility Act. You can’t steal anything in accessibility, obviously, but you can, you can be part of, of you can be. Have to listen to that act and follow it and then not do it. The risk of Fine. Now if, if you have to advise the world, I mean, okay, the, the, the team behind Novamira has been very smart asking you about and getting you on board. What if other people are thinking about creating similar tools? And I’m specifically talking about the bring your own API key tools. Are there more lawyers like you or are you currently the only one? Or are you the only one who is really approachable because the others are not so much into the geeky stuff.

Carlo Piana:
So it’s actually there are many, many lawyers knowledgeable about even more knowledgeable than I am in this kind of thing. So it’s, it’s not, it’s yet it’s still not very, very, very commonplace. It’s probably not the most rewarding specialty in, in law but more and more it’s becoming a widespread field of endeavor for lawyers. I think that mid sized to big firms cannot avoid having an IT law department nowadays. That’s my firm conviction and what I’m seeing now I have a lot of colleagues in big firms doing insane stuff doing because that’s once they said software is eating the world and now AI is eating software. And so maybe tomorrow there will be the next big thing. And you must stay ahead of development and advise not just by knowing the law because the law is still yet to come by and large, but to look and predict where the law will be. Because if you just react, you’re out of the game.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah. So would it be a good thing if people contact you before they start building anything or are you already drowning in work?

Carlo Piana:
Well, Novamira is just one example but I keep receiving queries from new projects. We have this idea this is becoming time consuming because my time is limited and I have a daytime job to, to attend to and so it’s, it’s difficult to.

Anne Bovelett:
But, but I mean are you, are you saying you were doing this on a voluntary basis?

Carlo Piana:
I can, I, I’m not rich enough to, to do that be that liberal in giving away my advice without.

Anne Bovelett:
No.

Carlo Piana:
I invest a lot of my time in pro bono to open source digital freedoms projects. But then again my time is worthwhile spending into worthwhile matter. I’m advising a lot of. I cannot say but many, many I already know because it’s public project like Document Foundation, Debian, many others. But yeah,

Anne Bovelett:
I’m just asking you from a practical point of view, if someone wants to be advised by you, like for example starting a project, then they have to calculate in the budget to get your guidance obviously because this is the one thing I personally, I’m really speaking for myself. It’s one of the most hurtful things for me in open source ever is that people think you’re not allowed to make money with open source products or you know, which is absolutely insane. People really misunderstand in my opinion what open source is about. It’s. I’m just asking you from a practical point of View, you know, if someone, if someone wants to be advised by you, like for example, starting a product, then they have to calculate in the budget to get your guidance. Obviously, because this is the one thing I personally, I’m really speaking for myself. It’s one of the most hurtful things for me in Open Source ever is that people think you’re not allowed to make money with Open source products, which is absolutely insane. People really misunderstand, in my opinion, what Open Source is about. It’s gotten this culture and maybe specifically in WordPress, I don’t know. That’s easier for you to judge than for me because I’ve been in the world of Joomla, WordPress, CMS made simple and all of that. And of course I dipped my toes into Linux. But I am not a operating system person. I mean, you can tell me fairy tales and I’ll believe you with blinking blue eyes, you know, so it’s, it’s just, it’s hardcore business. It’s just business, business, business, business. This is why, why it is so horrible when people start, start copying other people’s code without attribution and they just get away with it. I mean, this is why my heart sang when I heard that Ovation had won that case with your help. And I think these, this atmosphere of oh yeah, free, happy, we love everyone, is absolutely great, but business is business and these things need to have new word of 2026. Right. They need to have guard rails.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah. One of the things I’m getting money from because also being a lawyer is about earning sufficient money to, to stay afloat and is advising on the interaction between licensing and business models how to make money out of the Open Source project, which is not impossible. It’s difficult. It requires a lot of creativity, a lot of knowledge about the market and also the legal implications. But there are projects, projects which are 100% commercial and 100% open source. They leave. Not just they leave, they make a ton, a lot of money.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, so Carlo, you were saying before you are a board member of the Open Source initiative. I would love to hear more about that because to me that is like, okay, it’s there. What can you tell people who are only slightly involved into this, who you think need to learn more about it?

Carlo Piana:
People think that Open Source is just having access to the source code. Actually there is a longer, much longer history about that. The Open Source existed before the term Open Source was coined in late 60s so to speak. University started giving away software like Unix for free under a very small license called BSD for instance, or MIT, coincidentally the name of universities is behind that acronym. And but what happened mid-80s, all these Linuxes were not free anymore. Somebody else took them and made them proprietary. So no access to code. Everything closed down, shut down. So mid-80s, Richard Stallman started a movement called Free Software, trying to liberate this and making a new version of Unix called gnu. GNU is not Unix. That became kind of successful when Linux was also added to the equation. And Linux used the GNU GPL license. It was called Free Software, it was called Linux, it was called anything. But the term Open Source was going like 27 years ago. People say, oh, why don’t we call it Open Source? It was a more catchy and more precise name than Free Software. Free Software means you’re not paying. It’s not just free as in free speech, but is free beer. And so they say let’s call it Open Source. And some guys say yeah, but we need to define what Open Source is. And they came up with a definition, the Open Source definition. But somebody should tell if this is Open Source, that is not Open Source and this stuff. And so an initiative, a body was formed by these initial guys doing this definition and Open Source Initiative was that. So by its inception, the Open Source Initiative is the body that tells, that stewards the Open Source definition and tells this is Open Source, this is not Open Source. And the Open Source definition is like 10 rules which say you must be able to use the software for every purpose, you don’t discriminate on people, you don’t discriminate in technology, the source code must be available, blah blah, blah, blah blah. The most relevant part of this being copyright is what the license, the copyright license is. And the Open Source Initiative hosts a list of approved licenses which are also Open Source licenses. In general, we foster, we promote the concept of Open Source and the openness in general. So much so when AI was a. People start to say Open Source AI, we say wait a minute, is this really Open Source? Because this is not software, it’s something else. So we came up and we started a process to collect opinions, to collect contribution of what Open Source AI is. And this is just an example. But the Open Source Initiative is an advocacy group. If you say is a, is a, is a prestigious, it’s a. Is a relevant entity to, to tell apart what is open and what’s not and advocating and telling people how you can you tell. So we are interacting with entities, with foundations, with governments, with. So to. To. To. To educate and to make sure that people Understand when you say Open Source is not just an empty name, it’s something very precise, is very well established terms of the trade. You cannot abuse the term of Open Source because that would be a, will be a sham otherwise. So. And we are doing quite fine.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. One of the, one of the words I always connect to Open Source is freedom.

Carlo Piana:
Yeah. People say, oh, Open Source is different from Free software. Actually they are the same thing, only from two different angles. But one of the ways to say it’s Open Source is to see whether the four freedoms that beyond, beyond, far and beyond the definition of Open Source is the four freedoms are respected. So you have the freedom to use the software, modify the software, to distribute original and modify copies of the software, to study the software. It’s virtually the same. Only the free software is a more philosophical approach and we have a more practical approach.

Anne Bovelett:
I think also people don’t realize how, what nightmare we would land in worldwide if there wasn’t any Open Source software, because then we would be, we get victimized by the people who own the software that runs the world.

Carlo Piana:
Okay. It’s a very much important thing to say. Fortunately, today Open Source is really, really successful and it’s something that needs to be preserved. For instance, when the Cyber Resilience act in the EU was in, was drafted, somebody noticed that, oh, wait a minute. But this will be a disaster for independent Open Source developers because they will be suddenly they will be liable for bad software that they happen to do and they don’t get any money. And luckily we were ready to raise a hand, say, oh, have you noticed that most of the software around was made by Open Source operators without getting money in exchange? That would be a disaster if you say that these applies. Unfortunately they realized the mistake they were about to do. And now we have an exception for Open Source which is not monetized. As soon you use Open Source Development Store for monetary reward, which is something absolutely legit and of course it’s worthwhile. You are liable after you distribute, but not for the software. And you distribute and get money from but not for the software you made available to everybody. So this is the kind of things the Open Source and shifted does.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s amazing that you, you guys help the world to dodge that bullet. I mean that’s what it feels like when I hear this. But what about Open Source? Okay, so someone puts, let’s say stick with WordPress. It’s what I know best right now. People put a plugin in the, in the Repository, anyone can use it free of charge and then they advertise their pro version. Now people have always been telling me, if we release a pro version of something based on open source software, you’re paying for the support, you’re not paying for the software. How far does that hold up? Are these people who are releasing pro versions based on a freely available open source product, are they liable under this act, the Cyber Resilience act, or not?

Carlo Piana:
Let’s start from one concept. Open source is pro already and it’s a commercial software. And there’s no impediment in selling open source. The only thing you cannot do is say I give you the permission to use modifier only if you pay me. That’s open source. But many of the plugins which are quote unquote sold are actually open source and they carry a license. So it’s not a crime to monetizing this kind of thing as long as you don’t violate the license underneath.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, no, I’m being, I’m just being the devil’s advocate here. I mean, obviously I understand the concepts in itself, but I see there’s so many misunderstandings and I’ve also heard and seen conflicts where companies would change the Open Source license on whatever they were building on top of something else. And I think those are very interesting cases for lawyers like you where you go and dig in.

Carlo Piana:
There is a wide gamut of cases. Most of the time these are software elements created by one single entity. They say this is open source and they use this open source to build other things. But they get the permission because you cannot violate your own copyright. I make, it’s GPL, okay. Then I make an extension and I sell it a brand proprietary way and say, oh, that’s proprietary, you cannot do that. It’s open source, but it’s my open source so I cannot infringe on my copyright. So this is something that happens more often than not, of course, that detracts away from the open source, multi country, kind of bizarre approach. But it’s 100% legit open source.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, obviously. So, I mean, I think we could talk for hours and hours and hours, but we’ve already filled an entire hour. I think I have two last questions for you. The first one is what did you do in your career so far that still feels, fills you with great, great pride every day?

Carlo Piana:
A lot of things. I help a lot of companies to get out from a very bad situation. In a few cases I was enabled, unfortunately. But I think the work I’ve done in the antitrust is quite a remarkable achievement. I would say it was a 10 years activity there to foster a concept of free competition, interoperability, stop embrace and extend practices and fostering also open source as a competitor of proprietary software. This has had so much success that at one point I had two Microsoft employees in the board of the Open Source initiative.

Anne Bovelett:
Wow.

Carlo Piana:
That would have been impossible. Mid 2000s.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. That’s amazing.

Carlo Piana:
That’s quite remarkable. So we changed the way people think open source. It’s not just a weird thing, that’s a remarkable. I cannot claim more than one very, very tiny fraction of this, but a fraction nonetheless is on me.

Anne Bovelett:
It’s great because I mean open source is a community effort in the end and I think that’s one of the most beautiful things. And the more we get into AI, we’re joking about it saying Human is the new black, which is a reference that not everyone gets because it’s referring to that series Orange is the new black. But it’s like the new thing. Right. And as long as we keep fighting for things to be human, I think we’re doing a good job as a community. So Carlo, where can people find you?

Carlo Piana:
I’m not really shy. So you can Google. My firm is called Array Arrow, why? So the website is Array, eu, Eco, Uniform eu. And that’s the best way is to sell me an email. Carlo or K letter. K eu. That’s a way to reach me.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, wonderful. So we’re going to find you there. We will also be sharing the link to your website, the link to your talk at WordCamp year two years ago. So I want to thank you so much for your time because I know you are incredibly busy and I was so happy when you said oh yeah, I can do then and then, and then. So thank you, thank you very much and I hope we meet again.

Carlo Piana:
Sure, sure. I hope too we meet somewhere sometimes.

Anne Bovelett:
We will.

Carlo Piana:
I look forward to it.

Anne Bovelett:
Me too. Thank you so much.