Here is a list of the top open source licenses and their potential legal risks. To protect code and the organization, you need to understand the software licenses that governs the use of any code, including libraries and frameworks you didn’t write yourself. Most companies simply want to be “clean” in their use of third-party software. In some circumstances, a company could face an injunction against further distribution of products containing misused components, damages, or the possibility of having to publish its own source code. If a company reuses a component without a license or without following a license’s obligations, the copyright holder might sue. Software is licensed in different ways, and the downside of license noncompliance can be significant. Open source software is free of cost but not free of obligations it’s just controlled by a different sort of license. Most of those third-party components are open source. Even code snippets copied from Stack Overflow have obligations for reuse. And all software code comes with certain rights and obligations if used by others or incorporated in a company’s codebase.

In fact, in most applications the majority of the code comprises reused third-party components. If a company creates software, it also reuses code, including code snippets, libraries, functions, frameworks, and entire applications. Here are five common types of software licenses. Different types of software licenses require you to meet certain obligations if you want to reuse the code.

Linux software categories