OPEN-SOURCE NON-PROFIT LEGAL CENTER OPENS: Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor who has represented the Free Software Foundation in legal cases, has set up the Software Freedom Law Center to provide free legal advice to those in the open source movement, and it should have four full-time lawyers by the end of the year.

The center said in a statement that it will employ two full-time intellectual-property attorneys, who will help provide consulting services to non-profit open source organizations. The staff count is expected to expand to four later in 2005. The help they provide could include training lawyers, supporting litigation, dealing with licensing problems and keeping managing contributions to open source projects.

Overseeing the Software Freedom Law Center will be Moglen; Diane Peters, OSDL's general counsel; Daniel Weitzner, the principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and author.