Legal Development in an Industrial Context – FOSS in Taiwan

Abstract

This article examines how Taiwan, a country known for personal computer manufacturing, is learning to engage step-by-step with Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) in the context of both hardware production and software development. Taiwan is quickly becoming aware of the growing importance of FOSS and the legal issues it raises. In Taiwan, license contracts are treated as contracts sui generis with many possibilities for their interpretation. This report analyses how Taiwanese lawyers apply national legal norms and general principles in developing their understanding of FOSS license contracts, basing their assessment on positive codes such as the Contract Law, the Copyright Act, and even the Patent Act. The article also examines the famous multi-jurisdictional patent litigation between Finland’s Nokia and Taiwan’s HTC Corporation. Although the legal institutionalization of FOSS in Taiwan is not, as of yet, mature, the industry has nonetheless started to search for legal advice on the matter. Guidance from local research bodies, among whom the “Open Source Software Foundry” (OSSF, also known as “OpenFoundry”) is the most abundant and authoritative source of information on this topic.