Van Lindberg

Van Lindberg (born June 25, 1976) is an American attorney, software developer, and author. He works as a partner at Taylor English, a national law firm, and as the CEO of OSPOCO, an open source program office-as-a-service business. Since 2012, Lindberg has been a director on the Board of the Python Software Foundation, where he also currently serves as its general counsel. Prior to working at Taylor English, Lindberg was Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Rackspace, an attorney at the law firms of Dykema and Haynes and Boone, and as an engineer for the web hosting company Verio. Lindberg has been recognized by the American Bar Association Journal as "One of the Nation's 12 Techiest Attorneys."
Career
Lindberg is primarily known for his work on copyright and open source law. He is the author of the Cryptographic Autonomy License, a network open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative in February 2020. He is also an editor of the Open Source Casebook, and author of Intellectual Property and Open Source, a developer-focused guide to intellectual property issues that has been used as a textbook for teaching the concepts of intellectual property and open source licensing. In 2013, Lindberg testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the importance of open source models in copyright.
Controversy
The Cryptographic Autonomy License, or CAL, is a network copyleft license, requiring redistributors to make source code available. The CAL also contains a requirement to “maintain user autonomy” with respect to user data processed using the software. According to the license, anyone providing services using CAL-licensed software must also provide each recipient both a copy of the source code and the "User Data" pertaining to that recipient. The rationale, as argued by Lindberg, was that providing someone a copy of the source code alone, without also providing the user's data, was effectively prohibiting the user from self-hosting or migrating the software to a new location without loss of functionality.
The "User Data" provision of the CAL was controversial. Several long-time associates of the Open Source Initiative, most notably Bruce Perens, argued that requiring organizations to provide users their "user data" was a violation of tenet #6 of the Open Source Definition, prohibiting licenses from discriminating against fields of endeavor. After months of argument on the license-review list, Perens quit his association with OSI, saying that it was headed down the path of approviding licenses that were not "freedom-respecting." The OSI approved the CAL in February 2020, making it the second network copyleft license certified as "open source" by the board.
Patent Reform
Lindberg is also notable for his opposition to patent trolls. Under Lindberg, Rackspace became known for its extremely aggressive stance against patent trolls and its efforts to promote patent litigation reform, focusing on the Innovation Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and the PATENT Act, its companion in the U.S. Senate. Lindberg has appeared with Senator John Cornyn and in videos for the Internet Association in support of the legislation.
Rackspace Hosting, Inc. v. Rotatable Technologies LLC
In 2013-2014, Lindberg headed Rackspace's efforts against Rotatable Technologies, LLC, a non-practicing entity that was accusing companies of infringing patent U.S. 6,326,978 for using screen-rotation capabilities in apps running on the iOS and Android mobile operating systems. Rackspace rejected an immediate offer to settle the patent infringement case for $75,000 and instead instituted an inter partes review, leading to the patent being declared invalid. At the time of the decision, Rotatable had pending suits against 31 other companies.
Participation in Open Source Foundations
Lindberg has been in the leadership of various open source foundations. He has been an officer of the Python Software Foundation since 2007, serving as PyCon chair, general counsel, as well as Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Board. From 2013-2017, he was on the board of directors for the OpenStack Foundation and in 2014, Lindberg was the first chair of the Docker Governance Advisory Board.

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