The provision of support and maintenance services is often a key element in the structure of IT contracts which grant a customer with the rights to use or access a software solution, such as software licensing agreements or SaaS agreements. Naturally, support and maintenance services can also find their place in agreements for development of…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #18: Support and Maintenance for Software

In the current period characterized by soaring inflation and a tangible change in the talent market where dominance is now shifting towards employees rather than employers, the utility of the COLA clause in contracts seems to have become strikingly evident. This changing landscape that we are observing on the path towards digital transformation is being…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #17: The COLA clause

The first version of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) was released by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1991. Back then, that initial version was actually named GNU Library Public License and it was given the number 2.0 due to its correlation with version 2 of the ordinary GPL. The next version (LGPL…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #16: LGPL, libraries and linking

The third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL v3) was released by the Free Software Foundation back in 2007 after 18 months of public consultations and 4 published drafts. Currently, this is the most popular copyleft license. Unlike proprietary software licenses which impose certain limitations on the freedoms of an end user, copyleft…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #15: Diving into GPL v3

The most common termination ground you will encounter in commercial contracts is the right to terminate for cause. We can clearly distinguish it from the notion of termination for convenience where the terminating party can end the agreement at will at any point in time without having to give a reason about it. Unlike this,…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #14: Termination for cause

The possibility to terminate a contract at will is one of the most valuable options a party may ensure for itself during contract negotiations. In effect, such a provision gives that party great flexibility to walk away from the contract quickly and without having to go through costly and prolonged disputes. In a termination for…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #13: Termination for convenience

The MIT license is a permissive open source license that originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1980s. Currently, MIT is the second most popular among all OSS licenses, lagging behind Apache 2.0 with a narrow margin (30% usage for Apache 2.0 vs 26% usage for MIT based on data from WhiteSource).…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #12: The MIT license and the BSD family of licenses

The Apache license 2.0 is one of the most popular permissive OSS licenses. There are many examples of prominent software products and successful projects licensed under Apache 2.0. The list includes Kubernetes (the famous open source system for deployment and management of containerized apps), the majority of the Android mobile platform and its documentation, Apache…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #11: The Apache License 2.0

Two concepts that you will often encounter in tech contracts which involve storage and processing of data as part of the provided services are backups and disaster recovery. Despite being purely technical notions, both of these can produce legal implications and as such it is of high importance for a legal professional to be aware…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #10: Backups and Disaster Recovery

With the widespread adoption of cloud technologies over the past decade, it is no wonder that software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments are rapidly outpacing the traditional on-premise software licensing model. Based on annual growth at a rate of more than 16%, it is expected that the size of the global cloud market will expand from USD 445.3…Continue reading Tips on Tech Contracts #9: Escrow in the cloud