I think this is well written article that summaries the legal issues surrounding opensource:
Karen Copenhaver, a partner at law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, tells a story about running a seminar for a large company. The goal of the seminar was to make it clear that software developers had a responsibility to abide by their company’s guidelines surrounding the use of open-source, free and other third-party code.
Copenhaver thought it went well. Then the development group’s manager came up to her and said, “You know, these fellows can’t get everything they need to get done every day and worry about all of this stuff.”
The manager’s words lie at the core of an issue that affects countless development departments around the globe today. Faced with shrunken budgets, tight deadlines, the fear of jobs being shipped off to the lowest bidder and expanding demands for ever-more-complicated software, programmers are tempted to grab bits, pieces and even large bites of code from various third-party sources in order to get things done more quickly.
The consequences of this (to be kind) borrowing can be anodyne; that is, no one ever notices the code, the product ships (either externally or internally), and life goes on. Or the consequences can be catastrophic. Dirty code, according to intellectual property lawyers, has led to expensive delays during many mergers and acquisitions. And thanks to the efforts of a single programmer–Linux kernel contributor Harald Welte–at least 100 companies have been forced either to remove or release as open-source various pieces of GPL code that they borrowed without properly complying with the license.
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