Open Source Software Opportunities and Risks

Abstract: Open Source Software (OSS) history is traced to initial efforts in 1971 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab, the initial goals of OSS around Free vs. Freedom, and its evolution and impact on commercial and custom applications. Through OSS history, much of the research and has been around contributors (suppliers) to OSS projects, the commercialization, and overall success of OSS as a development process. In conjunction with OSS growth, intellectual property issues and licensing issues still remain. The consumers of OSS, application architects, in developing commercial or internal applications based upon OSS should consider license risk as they compose their applications using Component Based Software Development (CBSD) approaches, either through source code, binary, or standard protocols such as HTTP.