Legal Issue

Literature Summary

Ownership

Making software available for open-source usage has benefitted businesses in reducing their workload, costs, and need for knowledge, expertise and resources during the development process [24] . Though without tracking past ownership, and enhancements to OSS a user may be reluctant to use themselves. There is also an issue related to whether the end user, after enhancing the OSS to meet their own specifications would need to then make this openly available, potentially impacting on their business competitive advantage [17] [18] .

Licensing Regimes of OSS

The main issues around licensing are 1) Copyleft [21] [22] ,

2) Caveats attached to OSS and the potential for the owner, or author to take legal action if any are violated [25] [26] .

Liability

While reused software can help businesses expand their capabilities beyond their own knowledge by leveraging of others developments, there are significant gaps over who would be liable if something went wrong within the business due to a software asset which has been reused [23] . Businesses may be reluctant to use reused components without full assurance then are protected, though studies from [8] [9] show strong growth in the usage of reused components suggesting that while liability is an issue to overcome, it is being overcome in most cases, mainly by the risk being accepted by the business as the benefits are greater than the costs.