IP CLEANLINESS

At many points in the life of a software enterprise, determination of intellectual property (IP) cleanliness becomes critical. The value of an enterprise that develops and sells software may depend on how clean the software is from the IP perspective. This article examines various methods of ensuring software IP cleanliness and discusses some of the benefits and shortcomings of current solutions. The authors have grouped the general methods of managing IP contamination into two groups: 1. corrective methods, which try to detect contamination or IP policy infractions in a piece of software, and 2. preventive methods, that strive to stop unintentional penetration of undesirable code in a project. Corrective solutions by their very nature require there to be an asset to be analyzed, and therefore are commonly employed as a prefix to the load-build process or as a suffix to the product release process. Corrective solutions typically involve a combination of both manual and automated processes.