Lloyd’s of London syndicates are poised to underwrite
the use of open source software by users who are worried about
being sued by proprietary software makers claiming their software
patents have been violated.
Proprietary software company SCO has already started legal cases
against rival open-source software suppliers and Linux users, after
claiming its patented code was wrongly used in the development of
Linux. Microsoft has also warned users that using open-source
solutions leaves them open to being sued, although it has not
brought any of its own actions.
US-based insurance firm Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) is
arranging insurance for Linux users via brokers. The risk will be
underwritten by several Lloyd’s syndicates, said OSRM.
OSRM said the soon-to-be-available insurance will cover the use
of the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL
database and scripting languages Perl, PHP and Python. Other
open-source solutions may be added in the
future.
The cover will span all versions of Linux. At the moment, the
likes of Novell
and Red Hat offer Linux indemnification for their own Linux
distributions.