How risky is using open source code/licensing?

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David Roberts, Intellectual Property Attorney: So for a lot of companies today, they’re thinking about whether to use open source code or license some code that can accelerate the development process. But that does come with some risks to the company. Two main risks to think about would be first cybersecurity or just bugs that could be in the program itself and the second would be the integration complexity with the rest of your products and the rest of your code.

So one thing to think about would be the use of consultants. If you do choose to use a consultant that can come to the company and bring along a lot of experience or a lot of product that they can then customize for your particular application, that can be valuable, but you want to make sure your consulting agreement does include an assignment provision so it’s very clear who owns and who can use the end product.