Jump On the Bandwagon

Last week I attended a very informative CLE on Open Source Software 2008: Benefits, Risks and Challenges for Software Users, Developers and Investors, and was lucky enough to join Joyce Chow from Apple in presenting a session on Open Source Business Models. What made the seminar so useful was the breadth of topics it covered … everything from the nuts and bolts of open source licenses, to the technical details of linking and derivative works, and even ethics in open source (presented in part in a very entertaining fashion by Dave Marr, one of my colleagues at Sun). Bob Pierce, a former colleague of mine at Adobe, provides an informative review of the presentations on his blog.

In talking with other presenters and attendees, it became clear that the law surrounding open source software has reached a milestone. The skills needed to support an open source software business are no longer practiced by a handful of attorneys, and instead are skills that every attorney should have. Examples of the importance of understanding open source appear almost daily:

• Current economic troubles make the low cost and convenience of open source software particularly attractive to IT departments and businesses of all sizes.
  

• Cisco has been sued by the FSF and SFLC for failure to comply with the GPL - having a effective open source management process, knowing how to comply with open source licenses and ensuring such compliance occurs is critical to virtually all software businesses.

• The Open Inventions Network is pooling patents and prior art to protect Linux and the open source community from patent lawsuits - the open source community controls intellectual property rights for the benefit of the community.

• Gartner research shows that 85% of enterprises currently use open source software and the other 15% will within the next 12 months - even if you think your client doesn't use open source, it almost certainly does.

These are but a handful of examples, but searching everything from broadly circulated business periodicals to the most narrowly pointed open source geek blog will yield a virtually limitless supply of information on the growing importance of the open source model.

In short, this is the time to jump on the band wagon or be prepared to be left behind.