Open Source, Data & IP: Avoiding Due Diligence Landmines for Early-Stage Startups

Turning university research into a startup often means building your product quickly with open-source software, shared lab code, and real-world data. But early choices—like which open-source license you use, how you combine open-source and proprietary components, or how you handle training datasets—can create IP and compliance issues that surface during licensing, fundraising, or enterprise customer due diligence.

In this practical webinar, we’ll cover how common open-source licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL) affect commercialization and ownership, how to safely build products that mix open-source and proprietary code, and the most common data privacy mistakes founders make when collecting user data or using research/training datasets. We’ll close with a lightweight investor due diligence readiness checklist so you can confidently answer investor and enterprise questions on licensing and privacy.

Presenter:

Palash Basu, Calderon Saffran & Wright, an intellectual property (IP) lawyer with over a decade of experience representing renowned corporations, top universities, and pioneering technology startups. Palash brings additional experience in the areas of IP transactions, technology transfer, open source software licensing, data privacy, and AI governance.