The Pitfalls of Open Source Litigation - Page 2

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Licenses and lawsuits

Other general licenses are the GNU Lesser General Public License, the GNU Free Documentation License and the Affero General Public License. Each has its terms and conditions.

The licenses imposed by the developers can be wild and wacky. Some open source software is called beerware, because their licenses state that their users should buy the authors a beer or drink a beer in their honor if they meet. Peters said some enterprises don't let their staff use beerware "because they can't guarantee that their staff would recognize the developer at a conference."

Some really large companies have been sued over open source software. For example, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed suit against U.S. telecoms giant Verizon (NYSE: VZ) in December on behalf of open source software developer BusyBox for allegedly violating the GNU GPL.

The suit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, was settled in March. It is one of four launched on behalf of BusyBox, Peters said.

According to Peters, all four were for violations of the GNU GPL. Some of them have been settled, and under the terms of the settlement, companies were required to add an open source compliance officer to their teams, she added.

Enterprises have no clear guidelines as to what constitutes violation of open source licenses because most actions are settled out of court, Peters said. That "leaves a lot of ambiguities about open source because a lot of things haven't been settled in court, so your attorneys can't give you definitive advice," she added.

Peters recommended five steps enterprises should take to prevent lawsuits: Discover what open source software they have, create open source communities around each of these packages, implement an open source strategy and policy, manage the approval process, track and audit open source usage and ensure compliance with open source licenses.

"From the beginning you must audit your open source software," Peters said. "And you must track and audit usage so, if you do get sued, you can ensure you don't get into a $50 million lawsuit."