From the Lawyer: Open source software – the most important legal perspectives
This edition of From the Lawyer focuses on the fundamental legal aspects and considerations that should be taken into account before choosing to use open source software in your IT environment.
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What exactly is ‘open source’? The short answer is that it is a type of licensing that gives users access to the source code. Many people talk about open source software and ideology, but from a legal perspective, the term is simply an umbrella term for a number of license types. The one thing these licenses have in common is that, based on the open source ideology, they allow others to access and use the source code of the specific software without charge.
Like all other software, open source licenses are an intellectual property disposition of the author’s rights.
A common feature we see among many developers is that they don’t care much about the type of license under which open source works are released.
Although open source software development is often based on an ideology of free access to software, it is necessary as an organization to recognize the principle that open source is a license agreement. It is clear that users of open source software must navigate more or less understandable rights, forcing them to take positional risks every time a new open source component is introduced into the IT stack.
This article reviews a number of these risks that an organization must navigate when using open source.