Company: AWRE
Filing Date: 2025-03-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-038714
Chunk: 22

Company: AWARE INC /MA/
Filing Date: 2025-03-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 22
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 the products that we develop and sell to our customers could require expensive corrections and result in delayed or lost revenue, adverse customer reaction and negative publicity about us or our products and services. Customers who are not satisfied with any of our products may also bring claims against us for damages, which, even if unsuccessful, would likely be time-consuming to defend, and could result in costly litigation and payment of damages. Such claims could harm our reputation, financial results and competitive position.

Our business may be adversely affected by our use of open-source software. 

The software industry is making increasing use of open-source software in the development of products. We also license and integrate certain open-source software components from third parties into our software. Open-source software license agreements may require that the software code in these components or the software into which they are integrated be freely accessible under open-source terms. Many features we may wish to add to our products in the future may be available as open-source software and our development team may wish to make use of this software to reduce development costs and speed up the development process. While we carefully monitor the use of all open-source software and try to ensure that no open-source software is used in such a way as to require us to disclose the source code to the related product, such use could inadvertently occur.  If we were required to make our software freely available, our business could be seriously harmed.

We rely on third-party software to develop and provide our solutions and significant defects in third-party software could harm our business. 

We rely on software licensed from third parties to develop and offer some of our solutions. In addition, we may need to obtain future licenses from third parties to use software or other intellectual property associated with our solutions. We cannot assure you that these licenses will be available to us on acceptable terms, without significant price increases or at all. Any loss of the right to use any such software or other intellectual property required for the development and maintenance of our solutions could result in delays in the provision of our solutions until equivalent technology is either developed by us or, if available from others, is identified, obtained, and integrated, which could harm our business. Any errors or defects in third-party software could result in errors or a failure of our solutions, which could harm our business. 

We rely on third-party relationships.

We have a number of relationships with third parties that are significant to our sales, marketing, support, and product development efforts, including hosting facilities for our cloud-based services. We rely on software and hardware vendors, large system integrators