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Licensing Laziness Increasingly Spoils Software Use

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Free software does not mean free of costs. This was the argument from Microsoft (News - Alert) and many other commercial developers when open source software became a business trend. Yes, open source software was free. That did not mean that there were not costly hassles associated with it, however.

While the business community has developed a fuller understanding of the pros and cons of this supposedly “free” software, and has learned how and when to adopt open source software, it is again butting against unknown implicit costs that come with using open source. This time, the implicit cost is potential license litigation.

Black Duck Software (News - Alert) recently found that a full 77 percent of software projects on GitHub, one of the largest online software repositories for software, currently do not have a formal software license.

“For years the software industry has shifted from copyleft licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) to more permissive MIT (News - Alert) and Apache Software Foundation-style licensing,” noted a recent article on Readwrite.com. “The trend has become so pronounced that some question whether the GPL should even be taken seriously, particularly when applied to business.”

Instead of just a move away from the GPL, however, developers are moving away from formal licensing altogether. But this legally exposes businesses that use software with undefined software licenses.

According to Black Duck Software and its review of the software licensing landscape, roughly 42 percent of license-free software projects do come with strings attached in the form of embedded licenses. That is because many projects incorporate other open-source projects with licenses and associated duties attached for the downstream developer. These embedded license duties are passed on to business using the software without making those duties known, exposing the software and the parties using the software to the potential of litigation.

Smart businesses therefore do not use software without an explicit license, aware of the potential liability that can come from murky licensing.

But that means that roughly 400,000 open-source projects are out-of-bounds for the responsible enterprise. The cost of this lost opportunity is estimated to be around $59 billion in lost software savings, based on the Gartner (News - Alert) estimate that enterprise end-user software spend was $342 billion in 2012.

“Whether that cost is measured in billions of dollars of productivity lost or simply throttled adoption for a promising project, it's significant and something GitHub could easily rectify by encouraging or requiring a license,” noted Readwrite.com.

Software developers may be giving away their time and effort, but they’re also creating headaches and wasting a lot of the value of their effort.