VANCOUVER, British Columbia – May 6, 2010 – ActiveState, the dynamic languages company, and Olliance Group, a trusted open source consultancy, today announced the results of an informal survey that reflects the industry trend of enterprises increasingly focusing on open source license compliance and indemnification.
The survey was conducted in a webinar titled “Safeguarding against the risks of improper open source licensing – valuable lessons for software/hardware vendors” by Greg Olson, a senior partner at Olliance Group, and Bart Copeland, President and CEO of ActiveState. The webinar had 70 attendees and included a mix of information architects, lawyers and CIOs.
“Enterprises are telling us they see license compliance as one of their key challenges; and at the same time the response on indemnification says they don’t really have visibility into their degree of exposure,” commented Olson. “The results also imply that many enterprise developers are using open source components in applications and opening up their companies to legal or privacy risks without realizing it.”
“This survey mirrors what we see with our growing list of enterprises who choose ActiveState’s enterprise-ready ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl to ensure indemnification and redistribution rights for their products,” said Copeland. “Cisco, CA, VMWare, and many others trust ActiveState to solve compliance and indemnification challenges while they focus on delivering applications to market faster and growing their businesses.”
During the webinar, Olson and Copeland polled the audience with the following three questions:
What are the biggest challenges you face around integrating open source packages? (multiple choice answers)
Ensure license compliance for elements at distribution time – 68%
Maintaining code and version consistency across the company – 39%
Managing support for many open source elements – 32%
Higher volume of code acquisition decisions – 15%
Managing participation in public communities – 7%
What percentage of open source projects in your organization are currently indemnified? (single answer)
Don’t know – 62%
0-25% – 24%
26-50% – 4%
51-75% – 2%
76-100% – 8%
Which dynamic languages are you using in your enterprise development? (multiple choice)
Perl – 62%
Python – 40%
Tcl – 30%
PHP/Ruby/Javascript – 70%
None – 4%
Visit www.activestate.com/webinars to watch the recording of “Safeguarding against the risks of improper open source licensing – valuable lessons for software/hardware vendors“.
About ActiveState
ActiveState is the world leader in enabling companies to develop, manage, and distribute applications with dynamic languages. The company’s products and services for Perl, Python, Tcl and other web languages, are used by over 2 million developers and 97% of the Fortune 1000 to build and run applications from mission-critical to open source projects. ActiveState’s end-to-end solutions include development tools, language distributions, indemnification, OEM solutions, support and other services. With these, customers such as Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, and Lockheed Martin are able to accelerate productivity, minimize risk, and ensure compliance.
About Olliance Group
Olliance Group is the leading consulting firm for open source strategy development and implementation. Our mission is to help our clients capitalize on the strategic, technological, and financial benefits of open source software. Olliance has completed more than 400 engagements over the last eight years for clients including Fortune 500 enterprises, independent software vendors, start-up firms, venture capital groups and government entities. Olliance’s unique position and experience in the open source ecosystem strengthen our core offerings; open source strategy development, community building, sales and marketing strategies, IP management and compliance, and mergers and acquisitions.
Contact:
Bret Clement
pr@activestate.com
303.462.3057
