Lloyd's to provide open source insurance

Open source software may soon be covered by the world's oldest insurance provider.

The oldest insurance organisation in the world is reportedly planning to underwrite open source software for protection against claims of intellectual property (IP) infringement.

Lloyd's of London will offer protection to companies and organisations concerned about legal action over their use of open source software, such as the Linux operating system.

Products that are considered open source are freely available IT products.

John St Clair from insurance firm Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) told CNet News that the company is currently working with Lloyd's in developing the insurance field.

The products would cover the Apache Web server, Linux operating system, the MySQL database and the Perl, PHP and Python scripting languages, known as the LAMP stack.