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A recent Gartner research shows 85 percent of firms use at least one piece of open source software in their business IT infrastructure, with the remaining 15 percent expected to do so over the next twelve months. But while most of us would assume this is a good thing, the market researcher apparently thinks otherwise.

According to the report, 69 percent of these companies don't have a formal open-source management team and this apparently opens up huge potential liabilities for intellectual-property violations, inadvertent or not.

The Gartner survey results also indicated that open source software in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations; and that the top three reasons for using OSS were total cost of ownership, cheaper development and the fact that it is easier to embark on new IT projects or software initiatives using an open-source base.