The MS/TomTom FAT32 patent squabble illustrates that the MOST SIGNIFICANT danger comes from incorporating proprietary code that has *transitioned* into the public domain (such as by becoming a defacto standard, such as FAT32 on USB drives, MP3 players, etc.), OR by being surreptitiously "donated" by some beneVOLEant organization (ahem...Microsoft...Mono...Moonlight...OOXML).

Just compare:
- the number of lawsuits (and resulting damages) revolving around proprietary code or patents, to
- the number of lawsuits (and resulting damages) revolving around open-source code and GPL.

Certainly, everyone should be prudent in using code lawfully, but the biggest and most insidious (and most willfully-propagated) danger is coming from the likes of Microsoft (the big-ticket threat to virtually all other businesses on the planet).

Some companies might be at risk using open source tools. Maybe.

But now every open source tool isn't dangerous to use. If you look at companies such as Pentaho data integration or Talend (software I tend to use, no $ in them :D ), they both have large companies as client and are both open source. One of them even has the French police as customer with thousands of computers, having Talend open studio software installed on them. How could that be risky?

Some companies might be a little uncertain, others aren't. All you need is to be careful when choosing your open source company.

Andy wrote: "Well... You can't use open source for profit,"

You can do anything you want with open source AS LONG AS you abide by the license terms.

What happens if I just want to say fsck it, and actively destroy any evidence I can that proves that it belongs to me? What happens then?

OK, so it looks like everyone is getting something different out of this article.

I guess when I read it, I think of a company that writes their own software, who then includes open source software in their proprietary code to obtain desired functionality.

Well... You can't use open source for profit, so if you expect to profit from "your" software, it better not include open source components.

-

Buy something that doesn't suck.

It seams to me, the warning is not about using open source, but about the risk of being caught if one STEALS open source code. There is a difference I reckon.

For student: Sadly, a lot of books are to be learned, but not copied, from. An example: you can copy code from "numerical recipes in c" and use it only if you buy a copy for every engineer in your company. If you have 10 engineers, that's not a bad thing, if you have 10k...

So I'll tell you what I tell folks at google: "Books are to be learned from, not copied." at least not all of them, some publishers are better than others.

It's not fair
And I think you're really mean
I think you're really mean
I think you're really mean
Oh you're supposed to care
But you never ...

Oh it's not fair
And it's really not ok
It's really not ok
It's really not ok
Oh you're supposed to care
But all you do is take
Yeah all you do is take

And then you make this noise and its apparent it's all over

This action by these two may be intended as some sort of counter to Microsoft's "mixed-source" push.

C..p, how I am suppose to use equations without coping them from books?
This is getting crazy

Thought I'd point out a couple of things...

The point of the talk was to help the largely business audience understand what open source governance looks like in companies with a huge number of developers. The point of the talk is explaining the corner cases of the licenses that we've had to uniquely deal with was the point of the talk.

We've both released tens of millions of lines of code under a variety of licenses including the GPL. So we're clearly comfortable with open source intake and release.

We have nothing to sell to this audience and chose to speak only to show how we approach the challenge of open source compliance. We both have a vested interest in Linux and open source succeeding, so know that we were not trying to scare people away from it.

Just use common sense- have a policy, make sure people know the policy, and better still, use an automated tool (so many these days eg Protecode) to take the pain away from developers.

They had to have a briefing to tell developers that they should read licenses?

(1) Developers should be weary of "intellectual property" issues.

(2) Businesses should assess, plan, and test BEFORE diving into open source.

...And the rest is the usual "attention seeking" headline of a typical news site.

Nothing new here.

GPL bad, zlib and BSD licenses good?