• Commercial open source: Short-term gain, long-term liability?

    Commercial open-source software is open-source software that is being developed for commercial exploitation. Often, there is a single vendor behind the software (Elastic, Mongo, etc.) which tightly controls the intellectual property and the software’s roadmap (in contrast to community open source that typically has a wide range of stakeholders and broadly distributed copyright). Sadly, the…

  • Google layoffs show the perils of working in an OSPO

    Companies establish open source program offices (OSPOs) to manage the company’s transition to proficiently using, contributing, and leading open source projects. Among the leaders in open source is Google, yet in its recent round of layoffs, it decimated its OSPO, including its founder and many other high caliber open source enthusiasts. While nobody knows Google’s…

  • The three levels of source code analysis and their adversaries

    In our software composition analysis (SCA) projects, we have run into three ways of identifying open source code that has been added to a code base. We provide both code scanning and snippet matching services and partner with specialized experts on semantic analysis, if requested by a client.

  • A small legality in an open source lawsuit keeps us breathless

    The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) tells us that a lawsuit of theirs against TV maker Vizio was remanded (sent back) from US Federal Court to its original California court. Yawn!? Absolutely not! What is important here is why the lawsuit was sent back. The federal court agreed with the SFC that the problem at hand…

  • The costs of a Ph.D. student year around the world

    Open source has made it much easier to navigate the treacherous waters of intellectual property (IP) negotiations between academia and industry. The growing open source competence of product managers also makes it easier for companies to parcel out components and to sponsor open source projects at universities. Just how expensive is it? A German Ph.D.…

  • Surprise! Open Robotics got acquired by Google’s Intrinsic

    Last week the news broke that Intrinsic, an Alphabet (Google) company, acquired the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), makers of ROS 2. ROS 2 is an open source middleware for programming robots, and by now probably the most successful platform for this. The previous owner of OSRC was the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), an…