Chris Nadan is the Senior Director, Legal Services & Corporate Secretary for Actian Corporation, heading the legal department and responsible for all legal issues for the largest open source database company in the world. Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.) is the first to unveil a cloud development platform for building Action Apps, which are lightweight consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. He was formerly Senior Director and Deputy General Counsel for Sun Microsystems, Inc., heading the legal group responsible for supporting Sun software.
In addition, Mr. Nadan is an adjunct professor of law at the U.C. Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law where he teaches a course on intellectual property transactions. Mr. Nadan is also a frequent speaker to industry groups and has authored a number of published articles, including:
- Closing the Loophole: Open Source Licensing & the Implied Patent License" (26 The Computer & Internet Lawyer 1 (August 2009)).
- Software Licensing in the 21st Century: Are Software "Licenses" Really Sales, and How Will the Industry Respond? (32 Am. IP Law Ass'n Q. J. 555 (Fall 2004)) cited and followed by the 9th Circuit in Wall Data v. LA Sheriff, 447 F.3d 769 (2006).
- Open Source Licensing: Virus or Virtue?" (10 Texas IP Law Journal 349 (2002)).
Mr. Nadan is also co-author of the
Common Development & Distribution License (CDDL), an open source license certified by the Open Source Initiative.
Before joining Sun, Mr. Nadan was an intellectual property attorney at Farella, Braun & Martel in San Francisco where his practice included IP litigation and client counseling for high technology companies. Mr. Nadan received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law.