Van Lindberg practices intellectual property law, including patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret law as an attorney at at Haynes and Boone in Dallas. He has experience with both computer hardware and software, including digital circuit design, operating system design and implementation, application programming, and networked and distributed systems. Mr. Lindberg also has experience with virtualization, wireless networking, high-availability web-based systems and programming languages.
Mr. Lindberg has particular expertise in the Open Source licensing model. He helps analyze the risks and benefits of using and creating Open Source software and advises on compliance with Open Source licenses and is pro bono counsel for the Python Software Foundation, and likes programming in his spare time (Python of course).
Before becoming a lawyer, Van was a research and development engineer at NTT/Verio (a multinational telecom and Internet Protocol services provider), building automation tools and distributed systems, mostly in Python. He has been involved with open source since 1994, when a friend introduced him to Linux.
Van is a frequent speaker and writer on open source issues. He is the author of the O'Reilly book 'Intellectual Property and Open Source,' as well as a contributor to an upcoming book on Open Government. As an attorney, Van helps people build businesses around ideas. His experience allows him to analyze and evaluate intellectual property in a sale, license or litigation context. Van also participates in the Open Source community. He helps businesses work with and develop Open Source software and helps developers navigate the legal system to achieve project goals. What he does most, though, is translate — from 'lawyer' to 'engineer' and back. He likes working with both computer code and legal code to get things done.
Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code