Originally posted by Christopher Judd:
Is anybody else finding the lawyers preventing the use of open source again? I seemed like we got over some hurtles preventing us from using open source a couple of years ago.
The local big shops in Finland do indeed have certain blanket policies against open source. Basically, if you have big enough revenue to afford your own legal department, they'll eventually write a bunch of policies to prevent all sorts of legally risky stuff from happening. That's their job, in the end, so there's no need to blame them for doing so. It's the top management who should be held responsible for maintaining a healthy balance between playing safe and playing economically.
Originally posted by Christopher Judd:
Which open source license and/or products are you being prevented from using?
Recently, I heard that a client had a policy saying that anything from Apache can be trusted to be "safe" but anything else should be decided case by case and, I assume, with the project somehow taking the responsibility for legal consequences in case of dispute.
Originally posted by Christopher Judd:
Are the lawyers taking into consideration whether the open source effects run time or not?
Personally, I haven't met any resistance on development-time use of open source. If someone does the SCO on the open source project you're using, just stop using it and you're ok. If it's your production system that's dependent on the open source project, you may be looking at huge costs through shutting down those systems immediately and figuring out how to get them up and running again without the disputed open source project.
Originally posted by Christopher Judd:
What particular criteria are you using to make the lawyers happy?
Dead presidents. If the business says they won't pay multi-million dollar licenses for Oracle servers, the legal department has little power to make them pay those licenses...