Understand licences

Licences are complicated, yet it is extremely important to be on the legal side of things for open source businesses as well. Unfortunately, people in the FOSS world tend to take this important bit for granted. If you have plans to do business with OSS, you should master the finer points of licensing, or hire someone who is a master in this domain. Mathur explains, “Ideally, your tryst with open source technology can be of three types. You can deploy open source solutions in your organisation, consult people deploying open source solutions in their organisations, or develop open source solutions. Familiarity with the licensing procedures is extremely important in all three cases. If not, you may end up working with OSS platforms that have incompatible licences and encounter legal problems at any stage.”