Do you have an Open Mind for Open Source Software?

• Posted by Geoffrey G. Gussis on January 5th, 2005


• Filed in IT/Software/Internet, Intellectual Property, Risk Management & Compliance

Open source software (OSS) is here to stay - many companies have extensive OSS deployments - and many web presences of Fortune 500 companies rely heavily on OSS.  Many IT managers find OSS to be cheaper, more flexible and more secure than proprietary software offered by the software behemoths (e.g., Oracle, SAP, etc.).  OSS is having a major impact on how companies deal with IT projects, mergers and acquisitions and the development of key intellectual property assets.  In an article published by our friends at the Practising Law Institute, Stephen Mutkoski of Microsoft Corporation (yes, that Microsoft - they know the OSS score) lays out some of the issues involved with using OSS in development projects.  One of the most interesting tidbits in the article is a presentation slide that references an article from Oreilly.net that discussed the real economic losses that can result from OSS issues:

"When IBM acquired Think Dynamics, a painstaking manual examination of its code revealed 80 to 100 examples of open source code that Think Dynamics programmers had passed off as their own. As a result, the price of that company went down from 67 million dollars to 46 million–not a happy moment for its owners and shareholders, I’m sure."

More to come on OSS issues.