CoTegrity
– Helping You Safely Leverage Open Source
The
Good: Open Source is royalty free and
there are hundreds of thousands of separate projects available on the net. Leveraging open source and incorporating
it into your proprietary commercial software can make good business sense.
The
Bad: Open Source has legal license
obligations and some of it can contaminate your own software and force you to
give away your own 
source
code for free.
The Ugly:
Companies which have not met the license obligations have faced lawsuits,
loss of business and expensive re-engineering.
The
problem: Your own software probably has
some snippets of open source inside, that you may not even know about because it
was downloaded by an ex-employee or an outsource agency contractor. The license obligations were probably
not managed, and your own software may even be contaminated.
The solution:
• Decide
the license obligations you can accept and set a policy for approved licenses.
• Audit
your source code to find any embedded open source with un-approved licenses
that are contaminating your software.
• Replace
the contaminating open source snippets.
• Enforce
the license policy on an ongoing basis
CoTegrity
makes it easy:
We can
audit your software; identify any embedded open source; articulate the
resultant license obligations; recommend any open source that should be
reviewed for potential removal; and recommend alternative open source that is
safe to use.
Copyright © 2008, CoTegrity LLC.