Richard Fontana
My name is Richard Fontana. Currently I am something of a leech as far as contributing to the Fedora Project is concerned, but I do help out in the course of performing my day job as Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel at Red Hat.
I am very interested in issues relating to open source and free software law and policy and have given a number of talks on such subject matter, including:
- Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful (OSCON 2011)
- The Decline of the GPL, and What to Do About It (FOSDEM 2012)
- The Decline of the GPL, and What to Do About It (LF Collab Summit 2012 (Free as in Freedom oggcast recording
- Improving the Open Source Legal System
Upcoming talks:
- The Tragedy of the Commons Gatekeepers (LinuxCon NA 2012)
Some articles and essays I've written:
There's an old (2008) news article about Rob Tiller and me joining Red Hat.
I was a Red Hat Linux user for many years, beginning sometime in 1997. I didn't really begin using Fedora until I started working at Red Hat in early 2008. I've used Fedora nearly exclusively since then for laptop/desktop use.
Prior to joining Red Hat in 2008, I worked as Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, where I worked on various legal matters for nonprofit free software and open source projects and organizations, the best known of which was my work on GPLv3 for the FSF.
Contact
- Mail: rfontana at redhat dot com
- IRC: fontana on freenode
- Fedora Account: ref
- Identi.ca: fontana
- Twitter: richardfontana
- Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108734078357082390655
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardfontana
Some Other People Named Richard Fontana
I am not (nor do I know or am I related to): a Yonkers solo practitioner specializing to some degree in PI law, or a Monterey web designer.