Open Source IP: Palamida says SCO’s furore has died down..

Palamida, a firm providing software assurance management products and audit services arrived on the scene about one year after Black Duck Software, states that legal concerns over Open Source Intellectual Property are not over yet.

lawyers in pantsLawyers in pants by LordKhan

Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO, talking to Martin Veitch said:

The SCO furore might have died down, but the bigger issue of mixing and matching code from various sources has not gone away. I don’t know when the last time was I discussed SCO. It’s not particularly relevant to today’s world, but one of the outcomes of the rise of open-source software is that you have less visibility as to what’s in your code.

I really doubt that with open source you have “less visibility as to what’s in your code”, I would rather say the opposite, don’t you?

Open Source Insurance firms are looking for cases, but Tolliver talks also about mergers and acquisitions:

If you’re buying or selling software companies, there’s a large question as to what you are buying and how to value that. Palamida frequently gets involved in the nitty-gritty of deals, and often turns up surprising omissions in the declarations of what code bases contain. In one deal, the target company had disclosed [code from] three open-source products and our work showed 98 products. In our experience it’s zero malicious intent, just poor record-keeping.

This makes definitely more sense to me.

Read the full article.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Insurance, indemnification, Palamida, SCO