Open Source Legal Remediation

While open source if free to use, the licenses that they are attached to need to be complied with.

These licenses can either be permissive or restrictive.

Permissive Licenses – are easy to comply with and building an Intellectual Property (IP) on top of it is fairly risk free.

Restrictive Licenses – on the other hand can be pretty hard to comply with owing to the nature of the ask of the license terms, businesses tend to stay away from using them for the fear of expensive lawsuits if they are not properly complied with, there’s additional threat of losing IP too.

In a multi-supplier sourced development model of software, its hard to pinpoint the actual origin of each piece of software within the end-product.

Open source can find it’s way in from internal development, from externally sourced code & third party commercial code; all of this can potentially have open source, when a review is done before the release of the product to the market/external world (could be with customers, suppliers or to the open source community itself) – all kinds of compatibility issues pertaining to the use of open source might pop-up.

With releases around the corner and when businesses work on tight deadlines, it becomes imperative to sort out licensing issues that might arise.

Lyra’s dedicated team of open source compliance experts which includes the likes of lawyers and IP consultants whose role is to provide consulting expertise on remediating legal issues that arise between individual open source licenses which are more commonly known as inter-component licensing issues.

Additionally, we are able to provide our advice on how to manage open source license obligations in order for them to be fully compatible with the shipping license of the IP.