Liability and Indemnification
Mitigate risks associated with liability and lack of indemnification.
The lack of understanding surrounding open source licensing issues and indemnification provides an additional risk when using open source. A proprietary vendor — owning full control of the copyright and code of its product — can provide complete indemnification. An open source vendor may have its hands tied, since there are multiple contributors as well as third-party modules and licenses involved. To solve this problem, open source providers have come up with creative licensing and indemnification solutions to appropriately mitigate the risks to their users and provide users with clear background information on these issues. Knowing the risks upfront can help enterprise IT assess and understand the impact on their businesses.