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Ask HN: How do you track/report open source licenses for legal?

1 pointsby rwhitmanabout 4 years ago
I work for a development shop, and increasingly we have highly-technical software clients with legal counsel requesting that we do not use open source software without approval of the license by their team.<p>Now, the projects are largely Javascript (Node &#x2F; React) based, and this gets unwieldily and puts burden on us to make sure our developers understand the license and what the client&#x27;s legal team will support. Our engineers are not lawyers, they are not well versed in IP law and under time constraints, so its not uncommon to pick out a package without doing due diligence or submitting it for legal review.<p>A compromise we made with one client, was saying if the package manifest is available for review in Github then they can veto a package that they see as non-compliant or not up to par.<p>But some of our newer clients&#x27; legal depts are taking things a step further, expecting our team to submit the license for review &#x2F; approval, and attempting to put the burden on my team for legal liability if an OSS license created a conflict later, redlining that into the contract.<p>This would create a whole new category of additional work and expense that would slow down timelines and inflate the cost beyond where expectations are set.<p>What is a good way to deal with this? I&#x27;ve chatted about it with our lawyers and other than fighting these redlines in our contracts, we&#x27;re not clear on whats a reasonable solution going forward.

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