Revisiting Open Source

Ruchika Agrawal, Senior Corporate Counsel, Oracle Corporation, USA

Not so long ago, software industry leaders and academics debated the viability of open source and related business models. While open source debates and criticisms have evolved, much confusion remains about what open source means. Some assume that open source means free to take, use, modify, and distribute without being subject to some set of terms and conditions. That is false. Open source software, like commercial software, is distributed subject to a license, unless the code author(s) choose to dedicate their software to the public domain. Numerous open source licenses exist with varying degrees of conditions and obligations. Whether you are a developer contributing to an open source project or a business considering the use of some particular open source code in your product, you should read and understand the governing open source license to assess its impact on your code and business. To reduce confusion around open source, this paper will revisit what open source is, provide an overview of open source licenses, look at some recent cases, and examine the benefits and risks of using open source in software development.

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