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Use Open Source Safely
Finding open source code to help with application development is just the beginning
by Peter Varhol

Posted April 4, 2005

One of the significant advantages of writing applications today is that there is an almost unlimited supply of information, advice, and code available from books and especially on the Internet. Much of the code available from Internet sites is of high quality, and using it can knock weeks or even months off of a development effort, making the result more robust and better performing than it might be otherwise.

However, that same opportunity to achieve higher productivity and quality, along with shorter schedules, also comes with some risk. Some of those risks are legal in nature. By that I mean that the ownership and rights to use that source code are likely different in most instances, and understanding and tracking those rights can be both difficult and deceiving.

There are many facets to the question of using open source software in all of its flavors in enterprise IT departments. I have been working with some of these issues recently in my own work, and I was reminded of them again by a talk given at EclipseCon 2005 (held in early March in Burlingame, California) by Ira Heffan, an attorney for Goodwin Proctor, LLC, and a former software engineer. Heffan's talk was on the building of legal Eclipse plug-ins, but out of necessity he strayed into the realm of using open source code within a plug-in. Despite being the last talk on the schedule on the second full conference day, he drew over a hundred people to his session.

First, I'd like to offer a disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I have no legal training, and I am not providing legal advice of any sort. However, I have had to do some of these investigations, and I have read most of the open source licenses in use today. While I have crosschecked the information here, there are many possible interpretations, and I wouldn't necessarily count on mine. Instead, this information should lead you to a more serious investigation of your own use of open source.