Open-source software and code re-use improve developers' productivity, but at the risk of legal or financial troubles resulting from conflicts over copyright or patent issues. Knowledge Center contributor Mahshad Koohgoli explains how your enterprise can avoid traps when developing its software.Code
isn’t what it used to be. No one buys into a whole package of anything.
Even if you don’t outsource code, developers are the chefs of IT, using
an array of ingredients and creating a proprietary pot of stew. A few
Google searches and you can find anything out there, tools and service
repositories galore. So everyone picks and chooses, tailors and
customizes and—
Wait. How do you possibly keep track of this? How can you make sure you’re licensed for these on-the-fly creations?
It is estimated that 90 percent of the code being used now is open
source code. The use of that code is governed by rules and conditions
associated with licenses. With open source code, there are up to 100
main licenses and up to 1,000 variations on these licenses. Developers
would practically have to be licensing attorneys to know when they’re
breaching a contract. But, if you don’t follow the license demands of
each and every bit of code you mine and throw into your recipe, your
company may find that its competitive edge and product line isn’t
exactly theirs.
The financial impact is enormous. If you talk to VCs, any one of
them can tell you about an investment that went sour because of
contamination or ambiguity surrounding the intellectual property. In
the Microsoft-VeriSoft case, for example, some poor chap at Microsoft
had taken 53 lines of VeriSoft code and included it in 160,000 lines
that made up the code base. So it was .03 percent. Microsoft had to
change 50 of the lines from C to C++. So there were only three lines of
VeriSoft code left. But the judge gave it to VeriSoft. There is no
reason Microsoft would have intentionally plagiarized it, yet they paid
dearly.
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