Gideon Myles, specializes in all aspects of Intellectual Property, including the development of and day-to-day execution of patent, trademark, and open source strategies, policies, and procedures.
Gideon was previously a software engineer at Apple and IBM Research, as well as an associate in private practice. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a JD from Santa Clara Law School.
The key idea is to think strategically about the software, the value it can provide to the company, and whether the technology should be developed in-house. In some cases, software can provide more value to the company when it includes open source components. Here at Dropbox, for example, we use open source software in our products and we use it to help with development… Even here there are a few ground rules: We evaluate the code on the way in so we know what has been incorporated in our software later. And we prohibit code that is licensed under more restrictive terms that could require us to open source our product in turn.