Checklist · Technology, Media & Telecommunications / IT Contracts
Open source licence compliance review checklist (technology transactions and product releases)
A checklist for reviewing open source use in a codebase for a sale, investment, licence-out or product release: inventory, licence classification, distribution and network-use triggers, notice and source obligations, licence conflicts, AI-generated code and remediation.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- Australia, International / cross-border
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 18 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked on 18 October 2026 against the 2 authorities it cites, for Australia and International / cross-border.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use in technology due diligence, before distributing software or offering it as a service, and when a customer contract warrants open source compliance. Run it on an actual scan of the codebase, not a supplier’s summary.
Used for these tasks
Each task page says how far AI may help with the task and what the lawyer must review.
How AI may be used
AI may run and summarise the component scan and draft the issues table, but the lawyer classifies the licence obligations for the client’s actual distribution model and decides remediation.
AI may
- Summarise a software composition analysis report into the inventory table with component, version, licence and how it is used
- Flag licences with source-disclosure, network-use or attribution obligations for review
- Draft the issues table and a remediation list for the engineering team
AI must not
- Must not decide whether a licence obligation is triggered by the client’s distribution or hosting model
- Must not upload proprietary source code to a tool that retains or trains on it
- Must not treat a component’s licence as known without the licence text or SPDX identifier from the scan
The lawyer checks
- The inventory comes from a current scan and covers dependencies, containers and copied snippets
- Each copyleft or network-use licence has been assessed against how the software is distributed or offered as a service
- Notice, attribution and source-offer obligations are met in the release package
- Ownership of non-open-source code written by contractors or contributors is supported by signed assignments (s 196(3))
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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