December 07, 2005
Out of Town But Not Out of It
We're at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week. The first day is Thursday, December 7, so will try to log on tomorrow night and provide any interesting updates.
Posted by foodforthought at 04:56 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2005
We Try Our Best
We constantly talk and work with other companies to help them manage their third-party IP and the best practices around creating an IP Ingredients report. And at ipingredients.org, we eat our own dog food as well. We recently ran an IP Ingredients report for one of our own products. And during that process, we found a third-party product we knew were using, and dutifully listed the product and its license on our report. We also took it one step further and ran an IP Ingredients report for all the third-party code and licenses that was inside that product. [Does that make that fourth-party code?]. Interestingly, we found a license for that fourth-party code that our lawyers had a question about. There was nothing wrong with the terms of the license itself. The question our attorneys raised was based on the fact that they did not believe that the third-party product company had the authority to pass on that license to us, meaning that they could not accept that license on our behalf. So trying to practice what we preach, we went to the other vendor's web site, downloaded that fourth party code independently and accepted the terms of the license directly. So now we have a direct license with the fourth-party company, so that there is no confusion about our responsibilities surrounding the use of their code.
This little example proves to us that every company has responsibility for all the code and licenses in their code base, no matter how they received it. It also reminded us that a company's IP policy should be one that is constantly keeping up to date with the changes in its products....
Posted by foodforthought at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)