With Microsoft agreeing not to sue Novell SLES Support Subscription customers for patent infringement issues, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of OSS indemnification?
I’ve stated previously that indemnification is not as valuable as …

With Microsoft agreeing not to sue Novell SLES Support Subscription customers for patent infringement issues, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of OSS indemnification?
I’ve stated previously that indemnification is not as valuable as …

Which of these two tires would you rather have on your car:

[Tire Company A] If one of our tires randomly bursts, causing you to lose control and injure a 3rd party and you get sued, we’ll provide you legal counsel during the trial and even pay damages awarded against you for up to 4x what you paid for the tires.

[Tire Company B] We run 190 tests on all our tires to ensure product quality and specifically pay attention to manufacturing issues that could lead to tires bursting.
You said the tires that did both A & B right ;-)

So, what’s more important, legal cover after the fact, or ensuring the OSS product you’re using has gone through a rigorous process to identify and eliminate sticky IP issues.

I couldn’t figure out whether your 42-point certification process actually does IP-related scrubbing or whether it’s mainly focused on technical integration and dependency issues. But if OpenLogic does do scans for IP issues and fixes them, then I say make a bigger deal about it. Get the word out to your customers; educate them on why a CYA approach of requiring indemnification doesn’t really address the problem. (And seriously, if the customer is bigger than OpenLogic, they’ll likely use their own legal team wouldn’t they??)

We’ve done this with WAS CE customers and they absolutely understand and value the rigorous IP-related work we do.