12-25-2025, 08:57 AM
I'm the CTO of a startup that's built a commercial SaaS product using a mix of open-source libraries under various licenses, including some with strong copyleft clauses. We're preparing for a Series A funding round, and our potential investors are conducting deep due diligence on our licensing compliance and intellectual property risks. For other founders or legal advisors who have navigated this, what specific steps did you take to audit your codebase and dependencies for license compatibility? How do you manage the ongoing obligation to share source code modifications for copyleft-licensed components within a proprietary hosted service, and what policies have you implemented to prevent accidental inclusion of unvetted code by your development team?