OpenLogic Announces Open Source Compliance Help

OpenLogic  a vendor of enterprise open source software packages, has announced Open Source Fulfillment Center, a service designed, as company officials say, to help companies 'ensure compliance with open source licenses.'

 

No doubt another valuable service is helping them avoid lawsuits, such as what happened with 14 well known consumer electronics manufacturers this week, alleged to have violated terms of the GPLv2.

'Companies that distribute open source software under certain licenses must also offer source code, and the instructions needed to build the object code,' Jason Haislmaier, an open source lawyer and partner at Holme, Roberts and Owen, LLP, said. 'This week's copyright infringement lawsuit by the Software Freedom Law Center filed against 14 well known consumer electronics manufacturers underscores the importance of understanding and complying with all the open source software embedded in your products.'

 

So there. 

Although this is the official launch, company officials say OpenLogic has offered its Open Source Fulfillment Center to larger clients for some time.

The Fulfillment Center offers advice on the development of the processes and procedures needed to comply with the open source licenses, including distribution of source code. This includes a review of proposed processes by outside legal counsel with expertise on open source licensing. 

 

The company's personnel use a variety of tools to scan and analyze software and identify any embedded open source code, and give customers a warranted and indemnified report of open source software and licenses, the relevant license obligations, potential license conflicts and a 'compliance checklist.'

 

Earlier this month, OpenLogi announced that for the first time, it will begin to sell low cost support packages for community distributions of Linux and the CentOS Linux solution. 

CentOS is a stable operating system, 'which is created from freely available source code of Red HatEnterprise Linux. This expansion of support by OpenLogic will take place in 2010,' the report said.