Business users of open source software should review their open-source licensing agreements, audit their use, and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code.

Business users of open source software should review their Open Source licensing agreements, audit their use of Open Source and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code.

Open source software is present in 85% of enterprises and the remainder expect to deploy it in the next year, according to research from Gartner. However, 69% of organizations don't have a formal policy for evaluating open source usage in their organizations, according to the Gartner survey. This opens up potential liabilities for intellectual property violations.

WhiteHouse.gov released custom code used to develop their open platform built on Drupal. The majority of the code used in the web site of the White House is already open source, but developers are now releasing new code -distributed as Drupal modules- in order to benefit others.

Rosetta Stone's trademark lawsuit against a competitor brought to mind the simmering issue of trademark violations in open source. One of the opportunities and challenges in open source is that presumably anyone can be an expert in Project X, Y, or Z. Because of this dispersed expertise, the opportunity to run afoul of trademark violations is rife.

There are growing concerns in the open source community that has many Linux developers worried. And some system integrators feel the same way. Overall, technical support and licensing policies managing many open source projects are an afterthought, and this is exactly what has the Linux and open source community worried.

In recent weeks I have banged on about Open Source, expending two articles on Firefox alone. Open Source applications make their code available to everyone. Disagreements and rabid balkanisation within the Open Source community aside, for our purposes the term might as well refer to free software whose licence allows you to share the source code, alter it, use it, do with it what you will.

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.

One great benefit of using Linux, Apache, and other open source software is that you can modify the code to make it perfect for your business. But open source licensing restricts how you distribute the modifications. Here's what a CIO needs to know about open source licenses.