The following is not meant to be legal advice.
Michael Plumleigh, General Counsel, Critical Path, Inc. spoke to in house attorneys on
Besides the GPL, there are other forms of open source license agreements such as the BSD which allows the user to use and distribute source code and object code. The Mozilla Public License is less viral than the GPL. The IBM public license allows the program to be distributed in executable form. This means that the code may be distributed as a patch that gets executed/compiled when installed.
The disadvantages of using open source software is that the user needs to find maintenance support for the product. The company should monitor the use of the open source product, whether it be for internal infrastructure, or a product to be distributed. When a company licenses software in, the company should ask the licensor for representations disclosing the use of open source products such that the licensee is not affected by any negative impact in the use of the licensed product.
There are companies such as BlackDuck that provide whitepapers on best practices on its web site for policy samples in the use of open source. Some companies are writing risk factors on their use of open source products. For instance, Microsoft Corporation has a risk factor on competition. Symantec Corporation, another example, has a risk factor on product usage.
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