A lot of people do not even know about this concept ? What is a Legal Audit (or a similar name that may be followed by different software organizations). However, most project / program managers would know about using components from many different sources. And you would also have heard about patent disputes, where companies challenge each other about the software that they have written, and whether one of them was entitled to damages from the other for using a certain code over which the other claimed ownership (actually a patent is about the principle or concept or a specific feature, but you get the general idea).
How does this fit into the idea of something called a Legal Audit ? Patience.
Let me take a real life principle. In our team during the course of a product development cycle, the team is informed at the beginning of the cycle that they will not use any component from outside without speaking to their manager. However, during the middle of the cycle, I was speaking to the team about this (as a repeat) and later one of the team members approached me. It turned out that he was looking for an efficient XML parser and searched for an external component that would help him in this; he found something on the internet, downloaded and used it. Seems fine, after all, a lot of people might do this.
The problem was, we are living in a world where we need to respect the rights and copyrights of others, if we want others to respect our software. Our software has a global market of $40 million, and nobody would welcome a case against us for unlawful usage of an external component. It could be that we were fine with using this component, but nobody had done that kind of check. We looked at the component, and found that it had a license that was never going to be allowed for usage. The license wanted $1 for every customer usage of the software where this component was going to be installed, and if you think that we were ready to pay out tens of thousands of dollars for using such a component, I have nothing to say.
The Legal Audit is a way to do a scan of the software code to ensure that all the external components that are being used in the software are known, and the licenses are all approved towards this end. For product development where the product has been going through multiple versions, a lot of the components would have been in regular use over the years, and these can be quickly discounted. Most organizations would have a way to do this process in a way that minimizes the effort required.
Doing this process is essential, and in most cases, would require consultation with some software engineer or manager as well as with a legal expert (to sign off the final license agreements and to certify that the overall set of licenses used in the software are fine from the perspective of the organization).
And the Legal Audit can only be complete when the writing of new software is complete, since only then can it be sure that there is no further new code going to be written.
How does this fit into the idea of something called a Legal Audit ? Patience.
Let me take a real life principle. In our team during the course of a product development cycle, the team is informed at the beginning of the cycle that they will not use any component from outside without speaking to their manager. However, during the middle of the cycle, I was speaking to the team about this (as a repeat) and later one of the team members approached me. It turned out that he was looking for an efficient XML parser and searched for an external component that would help him in this; he found something on the internet, downloaded and used it. Seems fine, after all, a lot of people might do this.
The problem was, we are living in a world where we need to respect the rights and copyrights of others, if we want others to respect our software. Our software has a global market of $40 million, and nobody would welcome a case against us for unlawful usage of an external component. It could be that we were fine with using this component, but nobody had done that kind of check. We looked at the component, and found that it had a license that was never going to be allowed for usage. The license wanted $1 for every customer usage of the software where this component was going to be installed, and if you think that we were ready to pay out tens of thousands of dollars for using such a component, I have nothing to say.
The Legal Audit is a way to do a scan of the software code to ensure that all the external components that are being used in the software are known, and the licenses are all approved towards this end. For product development where the product has been going through multiple versions, a lot of the components would have been in regular use over the years, and these can be quickly discounted. Most organizations would have a way to do this process in a way that minimizes the effort required.
Doing this process is essential, and in most cases, would require consultation with some software engineer or manager as well as with a legal expert (to sign off the final license agreements and to certify that the overall set of licenses used in the software are fine from the perspective of the organization).
And the Legal Audit can only be complete when the writing of new software is complete, since only then can it be sure that there is no further new code going to be written.
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