Earticle

Over the past several years as the worlds of Commercial and Open Source Software (OSS) have moved towards each other, there have been increasing questions raised about the “legal risks” of various OSS licenses with the development practices and licensing models typically used by commercial software developers. These legal risks issues are said to be particularly acute in the context of software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), given that its so?called “Copyleft” terms require developers to pass on broad rights to the software their create using or incorporating GPL code. Although initially many open source proponents suggested that these existing commercial practices and intellectual property licensing models would need to yield to the terms of OSS licenses such as the GPL, some practitioners have now pointed out that the supposed legal risks have been misstated or even overstated. But there are significant legal risks in designing products that include both open source and proprietary components. The goal of this paper is to help the reader gain a basic understanding of the differences between open source and commercial software in terms of some of the practical implications of each and some of the broader issues that software developers, governments and commercial enterprises might want to consider in terms of their own policies and acquisition activities