Different licensing situations in software development - Part 4

In previous posts (licensing situations in software), I have talked about how not licensing any sort of stuff not owned by you can cause a lot of problems. This can be when you are using software that is not owned by your company (and for which you have not taken the license to use within your software), or when you are using content such as images that does not belong to you. Another great example is when you use quotes / sections from books / parts of poems that do not belong to you (which can happen if you are developing a software that does some sort of word processing / helps in the creative process / have a website that provides some sort of content (such as a site that provides you electronic greeting cards)). All these cases lead you towards violation of somebody else's ownership and possible legal action against you.
If you think that this is not serious, consider the following cases:
Claims by Microsoft (link). These claims are from Microsoft against Open Source software.
Action against Microsoft (link). This was a judgment against Microsoft by a judge for the incorporation of some software.
These are big cases, but there are smaller cases that happen all the time, where companies have to pay damages because they are using some components for which the licensing is not proper. So, you need to ensure that any component that you integrate, or any content owner by others that you integrate, all needs to be thought through and part of a strategy.
Well, this is enough for this post, will write more on this topic in the next post.

Different licensing situations in software development - Part 1

In the previous post (perils of using unlicensed software), I had talked about some of the problems that occur when members of a team start using software that is not licensed. In this post, I will try to cover some of the different types of licensing that exist and the complications that arise due to each of them.
First of all, some basic explanation. What is a software license ? A software license is a legal document that bestows some rights on a person. All software has some sort of copyright protection, which means that if you do not use the software in the prescribed way, you are in violation of the agreement, and can be prosecuted for the same. For example, you could be buying a software in a concessional format that allows the usage of the software only for single person use, and you end up letting all the members of a group use the same software (and I have seen that happening, and there was no check in the software to prevent that from happening).
So, each software typically comes with a license. The license can either be in the form of proprietary licenses or free / open source licenses. These 2 different types of licenses have fundamental differences in terms of the rights that they give to the end user.
Most commercial software have proprietary licenses, which impose some sort of restriction on the end users. The restriction could be in several forms. If you consider the use of codecs such as those used in the media industry, there are stiff terms for the usage of such codecs. For example, when you use software used for the creation of DVD's / Blue Ray discs, then the payment for the usage of such codecs / software could be in the range of the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or many dollars per unit of the end software sold. Using such software would typically need management approval, and also clearance from the legal team as well (and typically, if you are using software from somebody else, then you should have some sort of legal help to ensure that you are not getting into any trouble).

Will write more about this in the next version of the article.

Using unlicensed code in your software - the perils of doing so

We once had an interesting situation in our group. Our group makes application software, which sells fairly well and is one of the leaders in its segment. One of the guidelines that we follow (to ensure that our software does not get into any of the patents mess that seems to occur from time to time) is to ensure that nobody takes any random code from somewhere without control. This policy ensures that the software is at low risk of having people challenge us later that we violated their patents, and a court action can threaten the revenues that we earn from the sales of the software.
Why is there a problem with picking up code from different places ? Well, you need to be careful of the licensing of the software that you are using. If you don't have the proper rights of the software you are using, then your revenues are in grave danger. Once we had a developer running into a problem with a software assignment, he searched for a solution, found a software, downloaded it, and started using it. Unfortunately in all this, he never told his manager or the project manager about what had happened.
Towards the end of the project, another developer was looking at a bug, and found a set of binaries that looked unfamiliar. And then the story unraveled. We were able to find a substitute, and it was good that we did so; the alternate was to be found using the software that had a term in the license whereby we were compelled to pay a $1 fee for every unit we sold. That would have have a huge impact to revenue, especially since the software only sold for $19 per unit.
And I have not even covered the problems of using software that is covered under open source or LGPL, which has significant issues of its own (and which I will cover in another post). Typically, what needs to be done can be covered in 2 major preventive steps:
1. Ensure that each developer knows the policy with regard to using licensed software, knows the process of requesting usage of new software, and knows the penalties for violating such policies.
2. Ensure that the entire code base is checked for any such code that could be termed as unlicensed code, such that you have eliminated a major risk.