Open Source Is Free. Until Someone Comes to Collect. By Jacqueline Winter, CFO & CISO, ActiveState Finance has a long history of discovering that the liabilities nobody tracked were the ones nobody paid for. Open source software is the current version of that story. Free is not the same as without obligation. Every finance leader knows this. The land that cost nothing to use accrued environmental remediation costs over decades. The infrastructure that was already paid for accumulated deferred maintenance until the deferred became immediate. The financial instruments that required no upfront payment carried contingent liabilities that materialized at the worst possible moment. The pattern is consistent across domains, and the mechanism is always the same: when something costs nothing to acquire, it goes through no acquisition review. No due diligence process triggers. No risk register entry is created. The obligation that attaches to the consumption never gets tracked, because...