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Just a reminder, these posts are not legal advice. This site is the personal blog of Mark Radcliffe and the opinions expressed are those of Mark Radcliffe and not those of his clients, DLA Piper or the clients of DLA Piper.

About Me:

Mark Radcliffe

I earned a B.S. in Chemistry magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. I have been practicing law in Silicon Valley for over 25 years and am now a senior partner at DLA Piper. DLA Piper is a new global law firm formed in 2005 from the merger of three law firms. The firm now has 3600 lawyers in 25 countries and 65 cities. My practice is a mix of corporate securities and intellectual property. I work with many startups as well as large global companies. I have had the opportunity to work with companies in many industries, ranging from semiconductor to digital media to open source. I am the General Counsel, pro bono, of the Open Source Initiative and I ran the "Users" committee reviewing the GPLv3 draft.

Gartner: Open Source Software Adoption Continues to Rise

18/11/08

Gartner just reported that 85% companies currently use open source software and the remaining 15% expect to start using it within one year. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=801412.  They noted that OSS is frequently replacing proprietary software for applications. For new projects OSS is being equally adopted for mission critical and non mission critical projects. TCO and reducing development costs continue to be the lead drivers of OSS adoption, but concern about vendor lock in with proprietary software remains important.

They noted that governance remains the number one problem. They noted that 69% of companies surveyed do not have a formal policy for evaluating and cataloguing OSS use. This number is even more dramatic than the findings of the survey for the DLA Piper Global Technology Summit. http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=108

Gartner notes:

“Just because something is free doesn’t mean that it has no cost,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. “Companies must have a policy for procuring OSS, deciding which applications will be supported by OSS, and identifying the intellectual property risk or supportability risk associated with using OSS. Once a policy is in place, then there must be a governance process to enforce it.”

I strongly agree with this recommendation. As I have noted in the past, an open source use policy is essential for any company using software (in fact, a third party use policy is a more accurate description of the need because many “commercial” software components are readily available on the web). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=18. The failure to have a OSS (or Third Party Software) Use Policy runs the risk that a company will be liable for monetary damages due to intellectual property infringement and may even be prevented from distributing its products due to an injunction. The recent Jacobsen case, in particular, raises the risk of injunctions being granted for failure to comply with OSS licenses. http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=64.

An OSS Use Polcy provides the best protection from these risks. And such a policy can be lure for the best programmers if it permits contributions by employees to open source projects. Many programmers now contribute to open source projects and want the assurance that they can continue to do so even when working for a corporation.

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  6. [...] This situation is a warning to companies that they need to have an open source policy and a process for managing their work with the open source software.  See my earlier post, http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=107. [...]

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