Title:     Compliance Costs and the Apache License
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##The Apache OpenOffice Compliance Advantages

As you probably already know, you don't own software in the same way
you own a chair or a desk.  Instead, you license the software from
the publisher; this gives you permission to use the software, but
only under terms specified by the license.

In the case of Apache OpenOffice, this license is the
[Apache Software License 2.0][1], a free and open source software
license. Like other open source licenses, the Apache License explicitly
allows you to copy and redistribute the covered product, without any
license fees or royalties.

The Apache License is a permissive license: companies and individual
developers who create derivative products of OpenOffice can do so
free of any constraints on the license to apply to the derivative
product they release.

This makes OpenOffice an excellent choice for users and developers who
want to avoid compliance woes and related risks and costs.

##For Users: Reduced Software License Compliance Costs

In the case of commercial software, the licensing terms typically say
how many users or PC's may access the software.  The terms might even
include a clause allowing the vendor to audit your usage of the
software.

In order to avoid the expense and penalties of an audit from the
Business Software Alliance (BSA), including those originated by
employees turning in their employer for software piracy, organizations
are increasingly adopting Software Asset Management (SAM) practices to
ensure that their use of commercial software complies with the
applicable licenses.  These practices generally include employee
education along with the purchase of software to track licenses and
software use within the organization.

The combined cost of these SAM practices is the "cost of compliance"
for using commercial proprietary software products.  It is an expense
that does not make your organization more productive.  It is purely risk
mitigation.  Along with license, maintenance and training costs, it is
one of the expenses of using commercial software.

Open source software like Apache OpenOffice, instead, comes with a
license that explicitly permits free redistribution.  This reduces
the cost of compliance for many organizations, since tracking
application usage is not needed.

##For Developers: Reduced Constraints on Derivative Products

The permissive nature of the Apache License means that developers and
companies distributing derivative products needn't worry about
combining their code with the OpenOffice code and releasing derivative
products under their license of choice.

The Apache License has no propagative (or "copyleft", or "viral")
effects, i.e., it does not influence the license of the derivative
product: if you base your product on source code distributed under the
Apache License you have no legal obligation of releasing the entire
source code tree to the users of the program. All that is required is an
attribution of the Apache Licensed source code.

The Apache License thus reduces the need for employee education, the
frequency of internal audits, the intensity of internal audits.

[1]: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0