As developers today, we stand on the shoulders of giants. By building applications on top of an existing landscape of established open source components, we can spend our valuable time innovating rather than reinventing the wheel. But there is a distinction between using someone else’s code for inspiration and using open source directly without understanding the legal framework.
License restrictions
If you do not follow the license restrictions associated with the open source code you are using in your product, you can open yourself up to not only bad public relations but some serious lawsuits. To help mitigate the risk, someone in your team needs to have at least a basic understanding of open source license restrictions. It helps to put in place an actionable list of best practice and methods to automatically detect open-source components that may find their way into your code base.
Developers should follow the licensing conditions for every piece of code that uses open source, including subcomponents, no matter how small. This can be confusing. There are hundreds of different open source licenses and each has its own unique usage conditions. However, most…
