Soft­ware deve­lo­p­ment and open source licenses

Legal risks and com­pli­ance measures

Use of open source soft­ware has beco­me indis­pensable in soft­ware deve­lo­p­ment. The modu­lar cha­rac­ter of today’s soft­ware means that near­ly all soft­ware deve­lo­p­ment pro­jects con­tain traces of open source code, through the reu­se of who­le libra­ri­es or parts of libra­ri­es. But open source soft­ware is not neces­s­a­ri­ly free of third-party rights: licen­se terms may app­ly for deve­lo­p­ment of the soft­ware, as well as for com­mer­cial or other use, and tho­se who vio­la­te the terms of the licen­se may face con­sidera­ble legal con­se­quen­ces. Accor­din­gly, licen­se risks must be taken into account and com­pli­ance mea­su­res taken even in con­nec­tion with soft­ware development.

Open source soft­ware: copy­left and per­mis­si­ve licenses

The­re are a wide ran­ge of open source licen­ses. But com­pa­nies pri­ma­ri­ly use well-known stan­dard licen­ses which are dif­fe­ren­tia­ted based on the pre­sence of “copy­left” clau­ses. Strict copy­left clau­ses allow use only if the ori­gi­nal licen­se is retai­ned, and are desi­gned to exclude pro­prie­ta­ry use of open source soft­ware. Tho­se who use licen­ses with strict copy­left clau­ses are requi­red to publish chan­ges to the ori­gi­nal soft­ware under the ori­gi­nal licen­se. In the worst case, a sin­gle copy­left licen­se may “infect” lar­ge quan­ti­ties of pri­va­te­ly deve­lo­ped soft­ware. Examp­les of copy­left licen­ses are the GNU Gene­ral Public Licen­se (GPL) and the open source soft­ware licen­se of the Euro­pean Uni­on (EUPL). Per­mis­si­ve licen­ses, e.g. the Apa­che licen­ses and the BSD licen­ses, do not con­tain a copy­left clau­se and are the­r­e­fo­re easier to use for the deve­lo­p­ment of pro­prie­ta­ry soft­ware and in com­mer­cial pro­jects. But some docu­men­ta­ti­on requi­re­ments do app­ly, par­ti­cu­lar­ly rela­ting to the copy­right noti­ce, the licen­se terms and lia­bi­li­ty rules. The­re are also open source licen­ses with limi­t­ed copy­left clau­ses, which allow pro­prie­ta­ry use to a cer­tain ext­ent. An exam­p­le of this type of licen­se is the GNU Les­ser Gene­ral Public Licen­se (LGPL).

Open source com­pli­ance and soft­ware development

Open source com­pli­ance is indis­pensable in soft­ware deve­lo­p­ment. In order to con­form with legal requi­re­ments, it is neces­sa­ry first of all to exami­ne the open source soft­ware used. On this basis, a robust sys­tem should be estab­lished to mana­ge the use of open source soft­ware, con­sis­ting of com­pa­ny poli­ci­es and employee manu­als, inclu­ding key licen­se requi­re­ments and recom­men­da­ti­ons for action. In addi­ti­on, pro­ces­ses should be imple­men­ted for com­pli­ance with licen­sing requi­re­ments and trai­ning should be con­duc­ted in order to edu­ca­te employees about licen­se risks. Fur­ther infor­ma­ti­on about open source com­pli­ance can be found in our one-pager Open Source Soft­ware: How Com­pa­nies Can Avo­id Licen­se Risks .