Digital Rights Network

Lloyd's of London, the insurance market, has said that it will underwrite insurance provided by Open Source Risk Management to companies worried that their use of open source software might make them vulnerable to claims of patent infringement.

At the moment, vendors such as Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard, Novell and JBoss provide indemnities to users of their particular open source products but no-one has been willing to cover the use of software developed by someone else. Since most open source projects do not have the resources to provide such cover, this has led to many companies being unwilling to use open source technologies for fear of potential legal costs.

OSRM will begin by licensing implementations of LAMP for US$60 per server. As the average US patent action is estimated to cost US$2m, this can only help to protect the economic advantage of open source software.