2 Comments:

At 9:58 AM, Steve said...

I have looked into this and what they are offering is definitely not "real" insurance. As I understand it they are offering to provide some defense costs for their members.

I am in the insurance business in Atlanta and work with many technology companies. There is insurance readily available for copyright issues. I have been looking at the Open Source Code issue for sometime and it appears that patent might be a bigger issue than copyright. There is virtually no support for insurers taking on any patent risk exposures. I would be interested in knowing if the copyright risks related to open source code are signficant or if this is primarily a patent issue. I can be reached at shaase@insuretrust.com. Thanks Paul for setting up this valuable Blog site.

 

At 5:50 PM, Paul Arne said...

Steve,

Thanks for your post (and your kind words). Copyright is an issue in open source and the risks are probably higher in one sense and lower in another when comparing it to software developed as a proprietary product.

It's higher because the developers don't work for a single company, are more apt to believe that all software is free (even when existing copyright laws suggest that it's not), are less likely to have the checks on where the source came from, etc. It's also easier to see whether a copyright infringement has occurred, because source code is more readily available.

It's less risky because you can rewrite code to avoid a copyright claim. Therefore, even if something has been put into code that enables a copyright claim, programmers in the open source community are likely to band together to rewrite the offending sections quickly. This is exactly what the Linux community has offered to do in connection with the SCO litigation.

You are right that patents are a harder issue. Frequently, you can't code around a patent infringement issue. Nevertheless, patent risks with open source are similar to the patent risks with proprietary software, except that a proprietary software company is likely to be motivated to fix a patent problem with its code, while there is no counterpart to the software company in an open source product, at least usually.

Some of the concepts above are more fully developed in other areas of the blog, as well as my white paper.

On the insurance front, note that there is another group that purports to offer insurance in this area as well. It is the Open Source Risk Management group. Their web site is osriskmanagement.com. FYI.

Paul

 

Post a Comment

<< Home