I'm interested in what makes you think the term 'risk' is weird. In my experience most, if not the majority, of business decisions a company made were composed

I'm interested in what makes you think the term 'risk' is weird. In my experience most, if not the majority, of business decisions a company made were composed at the management level as a trade-off between risk and reward. The decision process included a list of things that could go wrong, or take longer than expected, Etc and those things were in the risk category, and things like time to market, operational efficiency, better margins, Etc. were in the reward category. From that perspective the choice to use open source software in their product seemed to often include two risks, one was how would you respond if it broke and the other was what would you have to do to replace it if it became unavailable for some reason. To use a pretty well known example, the Android system from Google, which you could compile and run on your phone for "free" but the risk was that Microsoft would (and did) come after you for patent infringement if you used it in a phone [1]. The risk here was to margins, where a manager might assume the cost of shipping this software was $0 (no license cost) and have it end up costing $Y because of patent fees. When Blekko was acquired by IBM we had to "blue wash" our code, which was to go through and identify every copyright, every comment that might imply ownership, and figure out if it was "okay", "not okay", or "needs more research." That entire exercise was described as "Minimizing the risk that the IBM company will be sued because they are using the code for your product." So that is where I'm coming from here. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-billions-android-patent-royalties-141047213.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...