Many companies are beginning to see the intrinsic value of open source software for the enterprise but as businesses piecemeal solutions together from a variety of options, it's easy to lose track of each app's updates and revisions -- leading to potential security issues from unknown or undocumented code.

Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.

It used to be there were only a couple of players in town who combed through software code, specifically looking for open source packages and licenses: Black Duck and Palamida. A year ago, we figured there was plenty of room for additional players, but we had no idea how many companies would end up coming to the open source code scanning table.

Coverity famously helps open source projects audit their code and eliminate security holes and other bugs, and earns its corporate income by selling software that does the same thing to proprietary software companies. Few seem to realize, though, that Coverity started doing free open source code audits because it got a grant from the US Department of Homeland Security.

The third version of the General Public Licence (GPLv3) has been adopted by 116 open source projects in its first week of operation, according to an overview compiled by software risk management firm Palamida.

Following Sun Microsystems' decision to release a raft of open source applications to support its secure cloud computing strategy, companies may be wondering if they should conduct security tests of their customized open source software before deployment.

An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs.

If the government uses open source software, then the government is at risk because the security flaws are exposed publicly. The use of proprietary software protects the government from security attacks because its code is hidden and not released to the public.

The Linux Foundation has announced that compliance and IP management specialist Palamida has become its newest member. Palamida will collaborate on and contribute to the non-profit organisation's new Open Compliance Program