Five Tips For Every In-House Counsel Launching An Open Source Software Program

Used properly, Open Source Software (OSS) is an excellent tool. It saves your business time and money, enables interoperability of product platforms, and developers love it. But used improperly, it can be financially and operationally devastating. For example, the statutory damages for failure to properly adhere to the OSS copyright notice can be up to $150,000 per act of infringement. Those damages can quickly add up to serious consequences, whether preventing a sale or merger of your company or the destruction of the value of the affected products. Another serious risk is that once OSS is used in your code base and deployed in distributed products, if your tech teams are not monitoring and applying bug fixes, known vulnerabilities become Trojan horses of opportunity for bad actors. The good news is that protecting your company from these types of risks is rather simple. We have outlined below key steps and processes in-house counsel should take to work with