Open source software solutions have become popular. So popular that there has been many educational seminars on the topic. Just this month, the American Corporate Counsel had a session on open source on its March 23, 2006 training in Northern California, and Baker & McKenzie has scheduled an event for April 11, 2006 in Palo Alto, CA.
Open source products are not proprietary and rely on the open source community to improve them. The products are free, but they usually come "as is" with no warranties, and there are risks associated with modifying the products in that if the license agreements are not carefully followed, there may be claims for intellectual property violations.
It is the complexity of the license agreements that many people require training on prior to use of the products.
Aaron Swartz of The Weblog provided an engineer's perspective on open source license agreements in the form of haikus (content found in public domain):
MIT License: take my code with you/and do whatever you want/but please don't blame me
LGPL: you can copy this/but make modified versions/free in source code form
GPL: if you use this code/you and your children's children/must make your source free
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