Why You Need To Understand Your Software Supply Chain

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Every company uses software, obviously. There isn’t a technology industry keynote that passes without a besuited evangelist telling us that ‘every business is a technology business’ – and they may even pepper in the old ‘hey Uber has no cars, Amazon has no bookstores’ chestnut if they really want to check all the boxes.

But software these days rarely comes on a CD-ROM or in a box, even when it is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software product. The downloaded, continuously updated nature of software creates what the industry likes to call the ‘software supply chain’. Because an increasing amount of this software is open source, we need to understand what implications this has for the shape of the chain.

Duncan Clark, head of PatSnap Academy points out that open source software can enter customers source code, including their internally developed proprietary code, in many different and often undocumented ways. Managing this process is key to working with open source channels effectively.

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