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October 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
The "no open source" clause
Just when you think the world is getting more savvy on open source...
I was reviewing a contract the other day with a major Fortune 500 institution. This is a forward-looking institution with a massive IT budget and, no doubt, Linux and other open source running rampant throughout its organization.
I was therefore amused to see this clause in the contract they provided to us:
Alfresco hereby warrants that the Software contains no open source code and that it will not provide any open source software as part of its Services or Software.Um, we have a problem here....
I explained to them that all of our software is open source, and why they should be happy about this fact. They now are, but it's always surprising to find persistent misconceptions about open source in the savviest of companies.
It reminds me of a presentation I delivered years ago to the IT workers of the State of Texas. My presentation followed that of the State's general counsel (for IT, anyway), who spent her 45 minutes warning the IT staff to not use open source and to wait until the State had a formal policy in place for adoption of open source.
As soon as she left the room, I asked for a raise of hands for "All those currently using open source in your work." 80% of the hands went up (and I suspect the other 20% were lying :-).
Open source is everywhere. Might as well get used to it.
Posted by Matt Asay on October 25, 2006 10:54 AM
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I see the same thing all over the place, primarily in the US. I think it's a classic case of "fear of the unknown". Especially in law departments where the first thing that probably comes to mind after hearing the words "open source" is "indemnification". But, an even more prevalent "no open source" lack-of-understanding I have run into is upon asking several senior IT executives how much open source they are using in their organizations, and they respond with, "None." Of course, upon further inspection by our automated discovery tools, we often find there is a ton of OSS in use in their shops.
Anthony Gold, Unisys Corporation
Posted by: Anthony Gold at October 29, 2006 07:20 PM
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