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Learn about tl;drLegal’s verified license summaries and review process
Since 2012, tl;drLegal has been demystifying open source software licenses with simple, practical summaries. So far, our community has sent over 1.5 million license summaries to hundreds of thousands of people across the globe and brought a peer-reviewed quality to our guides.
It's important to us that people can trust the summaries they read on tl;drLegal. Some of today's most popular licenses are vague, outdated, and open to interpretation. Choosing how to represent them is critical, and there's no more informed opinion than from the people involved in writing and litigating these licenses. This is why we’ve partnered with experts in the field to review our top summaries.
When adding a more formal review to a summary, our goal is to be as accurate as possible while making sure we preserve simplicity and practical usefulness. When summaries on tl;drLegal get popular or significant enough, we'll point our top and most credentialed community members towards making sure the summary is detailed enough but without compromising our goal.
If you find that if any of our verified summaries are wordy or unclear, please feel free to get in touch! As a reminder, by adding a "verified" badge, we're not guaranteeing the legal viability of our summaries, but instead a level of quality as defined above.
If you find a license that you'd like to submit to the review process, please contact us.
Heather is one of the world's foremost experts in open source license compliance and the main contributor to our summary review process. Her experience includes being on the core team for drafting the Mozilla Public License 2.0, litigation experience with the GPL & LGPL, and serving as counsel for the Mozilla Foundation.
As an internationally-known expert in software licensing, for over 20 years Heather has been a thought leader and trusted advisor on the use of open source software in business, and has helped scores of emerging companies structure licensing and business models.
As a lawyer in private practice, Heather has been recognized with many awards for her work in law and technology, and advised clients from startups to global enterprises on software licenses and software copyright. She is a prolific writer and speaker on software licensing, and is the author of Open Source for Business, a go-to handbook for open source licensing in commerce.
