Process and Compliance Resources for Companies that Distribute Open Source Software

Last modified by Stefano Maffulli on 2023/02/17 01:52

Background

Many companies that distribute software that includes open source have put in place processes that help them effectively and legally work with and distribute open source. The documents below can help new companies create processes for themselves!

If you know of open source best practices that would fit on this list, please feel free to add them! The list has been created by OSI community members, but OSI does not endorse any particular process.

To discuss this page, please drop an email to the license-discuss mailing list.

Reminder about using open source

Using open source within your own company is easy, because open source software always guarantees you the right to use open source software without restriction. The processes described in the documents below are for companies who distribute open source outside of their own company.

In general one can say, that you can't buy the right to redistribute open source software. Instead of this, you have to actively execute some tasks and to respect some conditions the open source licenses require. There is no need to worry. It is not expensive to implement these requirements for redistributing the software compliantly! Moreover, in most of all cases these costs are negligible. The only issue is to do the right things in the right circumstances. The following documents assist you to find your specific answers:

White papers and other documents

Tools

This wiki has a list of open source tools that can help implement and manage the processes discussed above.

Tags:
    

Submit feedback regarding this wiki to webmaster@opensource.org

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 license
XWiki 14.10.13 - Documentation