One key element of open source compliance is to know your obligations. There is a lot of confusion about what open source means exactly and some people believe that open source means you can do whatever you want. While open source grants users many freedoms, open source code comes under specific license terms which often include obligations that have to be followed by companies distributing open source software.
Because of recent lawsuits by the Software Freedom Law Center on behalf of the busybox project and the activities of the GPL-Violations project, awareness is growing that copyleft licenses such as the GPL come with obligations. For example, the GPL requires source code to be offered to those who receive binaries. The AGPL goes a step further and additionally requires that the source code be made available to users who interact with the software over the network.
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