Open Source to the Rescue?

Open source software sounds great and it has genuinely improved costs for businesses, particularly small firms. But there are a lot of pitfalls you need to watch out for. As a former developer, I was always skittish about incorporating open source into my codebase because of licensing issues. A tiny little library might "infect" your entire source with a nasty GNU license virus that effectively takes over your entire license. That's because Richard Stallman, who founded GNU, is an ideologue. This article at ACM's Queue explains:

"...in practice, the GPL is actually one of the less "free" software licenses out there because it requires anyone who modifies a GPL'd program to make the program's code freely available, if the program is "distributed" to others."

Ok, not so cool if you want to distribute your code instead of just run it internally. So a cottage industry of competing licenses have popped up which provide dozens of variations on the GNU license. The ACM also provided this handy map to explain your rights:

And then, of course, Linux OS modifications are a whole other ball of wax. Of course, unless there are any kernel hackers in the class, we probably don't need to worry about that.