Open Source Considerations

Recently, I attended a discussion on opensource and the dangers it presented to the big corporates. It was conducted by a big corporate lawyer and I don’t necessarily agree with all that was said, nevertheless, it was an eye opener.

In an ideal world, opensource / free software works perfectly. (I don’t subscribe to the free software ideology BTW). Somebody starts a great project and puts it up for the world to use. All the great hackers see the code, fix the bad, better the good and eventually you have a great piece of software. This might be over-simplification of the process, but in most cases, it works just fine.

The complications arise when a rogue contributor contributes copyrighted code into an opensource project. Now, anybody who uses this code becomes liable to copyright violation lawsuits from the original (or subsequent) owner(s) of the code.

Of course, what becomes of the lawsuit depends on whether or not the actual similarity and theft of the code can be proved. It might be pure speculation or co-incidence. On the other hand, for instance, it might be proved that the rogue contributor had access to the original copyrighted code as a former employee.

I don’t know of a lawsuit that succeeded like this, but it is a definite possibility. What makes matters worse is that companies like Microsoft, when they pitch themselves against opensource software, offer their customers complete protection against any liability that arises out of use of Microsoft products including copyright violation lawsuits.

To counter this, a similar protection is being offered for the use of opensource products through the OSI initiative, backed by companies such as IBM.

The solution that I liked was that used by projects like Apache. They make contributors acknowledge that they are the sole owners of the code and the code doesn’t violate any copyrights before accepting it into the project.

Permalink | Trackback | Open-Source