Companies are using more free software than ever, but often with little or no understanding of the licenses or the community norms that are part of the package. When it comes to talking about free software legal tools, we need to control the message. If we let other entities fill in the gaps in our outreach strategy, a lot of context and nuance will be lost. A poor or incomplete message hinders our ability to gain more widespread acceptance of free software tools and practices.

Suing collaborators or consciously working to erode well-established community norms for short term gain has no place in the world the free software community is trying to build. Massive, globally useful, customizable software projects aren't merely a side effect of publicly available repositories, they're a product of intentionally cooperative communities with rules and legal safeguards. The FOSS community's message must be, "If you don't respect our legal tools, then you aren't a free or open source software company."

Policy isn't made by coders. Official government policy is made by judges and legislators and company policy is made by engaging with business and legal teams. We need to foster better understanding of our tools and norms amongst policy makers. This talk will offer ideas on how we should craft and deliver our message around the adoption of free software legal tools.