Have you heard of the recent decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit? Using third-party software, either open source or outsource-developed, may lead to Intellectual Property (IP) or copyright infringement issues, but rest assured the problem is manageable with the latest tools.
The ruling sharpened the claws of open source software licenses which set conditions on their use. If you violate the conditions you become a copyright infringer with an opportunity of landing in court. Does this mean that open source software is detrimental? Not at all, as long as you know what software components are in your code and abide by the licensing that rules them.
There are thousands of code modules available and outsourced software development is prevalent in the telecommunications industry. Call processing, network and performance management are available from projects like Asterisk, OpenSIPStack, FreeSwitch, RTPlib, SipX and OpenPBX.
Growth of outsourcing and open source with hundreds of license variations makes code contamination a common occurrence. These days, software development has become an assembly of code modules (proprietary, open source, outsourced or commercial). Re-using code is important for profitability as costs are paramount and time-to-market is critical. But perceived IP issues can delay projects, product sales cycles or business transactions while reducing the value of the software or the entire company. Worse, it may lead to onerous IP infringement rulings.
Open source is freely available but not free of regulation due to licenses that affect use, modification and distribution. Even hosted services may become affected by license restrictions.
Software development practices have progressed but some key disciplines that are standard in hardware development have yet to be adopted:
An approved vendor list containing the qualified components and commercial terms for developers to select components without concern.
A Bill of Materials (BoM) to enable proper use and distribution, determine value and track vendor upgrades.
Discipline in software governance requires that clear software IP policies are defined in line with organizational goals, the supplier list is rationalized for cost, performance and maintenance efficiencies and accurate records are kept.
A sound software IP policy provides an effective list of approved vendors and acceptable types of software to ensure compliance and safeguarding relative to what is allowed and what is not, and potential use and distribution restrictions including exports.
Setting up a license policy requires educated input from legal, business and technical perspectives. Such policies are centrally defined, easy to enforce and allow tracking compliance as development proceeds apace.
Maintaining accurate records requires knowledge of all external and internal components in a project, and who brought in what, when, and licensing attributes.
If you are buying software make sure it has a clean BoM. If you are selling, ascertain beforehand that it has a proper pedigree to avoid going to court or suffering through a retrospective due diligence process.
Several commercial software tools are available to supplant the archaic manual methods of ensuring management. They enable cost-effective, disciplined development through detection, logging, identification and pedigree-tagging of software content and provisioning of IP compliance reports, thus reducing business risks, ensuring compliance and protection and achieving higher revenues at lower costs.
More at protecode.com.
© 2008 Telecom Reseller. All Rights Reserved.