OSRM, which, as its name suggests, provides risk management to corporate users of free and open source software, has kicked off an Open Source Insurance Initiative that Jones' appointment is part of. OSRM founder Daniel Egger thinks that by fostering a collaborative, community-based model for identifying and mitigating relevant litigation risks will allow it to offer its comprehensive insurance at the lowest possible cost.

Jones will still manage the Groklaw site and she's supposed to have editorial independence, but as she herself points out there's obviously synergy between the two endeavors. She hopes the research will "result in building a bulwark of legal protection for GNU/Linux software."

She said that she sees "a need for low-cost vendor-neutral protection that will at the same time make it possible to allow continued free modification of the code. No one else has successfully done so. I believe OSRM has come up with the right answer."

OSRM was started last year and says it provides code-scanning and copyright infringement detection technologies, risk assessment, risk mitigation consulting, best practices training and certification, vendor-neutral indemnification and custom insurance to the Global 1000.

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