ADVISOR · LICENSING & NEGOTIATION
Fredrik Filipsson
Background
Fredrik has spent more than two decades on both sides of enterprise software licensing negotiations. His career began at Oracle in License Management Services, where he ran audit and compliance engagements for Fortune 500 customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia — the same kind of engagements he now defends buyers against. From there he moved into senior commercial roles at IBM and SAP before crossing permanently to the buyer side of the table.
In 2018 he co-founded Redress Compliance, an independent, buyer-side software licensing advisory firm that has delivered more than five hundred enterprise engagements. As Group CEO he leads the firm's Oracle practice and its most complex multi-vendor negotiations, and his commentary on Oracle Java licensing, ULA exits, and enterprise agreement economics has been cited in trade publications and CIO briefings. He is a regular speaker at procurement, IT asset management, and CIO events.
The relicensing wave brought the same commercial pattern he had watched for twenty years — a vendor changes the terms, uncertainty appears, and the buyer pays for it — into open source. OpenSource Risk Experts is the response: the same independent, buyer-side discipline applied to Business Source License and Server Side Public License exposure. On this site Fredrik leads the licensing and negotiation practice: commercial license negotiations with source-available vendors, relicensing exposure reviews, and the negotiation playbooks documented across the commercial licensing hub. He is paid only by the buyer. He sells no software, takes no vendor referral fee, and holds no partner status with any vendor discussed on this site.
Areas of expertise
Selected work
Fredrik authors the negotiation and commercial licensing content across this site, including the commercial open source licensing pillar guide, the vendor-specific negotiation guides for HashiCorp, MongoDB, and Elastic, and the HashiCorp commercial-surprise case study. He also contributes to the State of Relicensing Exposure 2026 research study.
Outside this site, he writes on enterprise software licensing at the Redress Compliance blog.
How Fredrik works
Engagements start with the inventory, not the vendor's quote. Fredrik's first step in any commercial negotiation is establishing exactly what the organization runs and which deployments the license terms actually reach — because the gap between a vendor's sizing and a verified footprint is usually where the money is. From there the work follows the playbook documented across this site: price the credible alternative before the first call, negotiate scope before rate, and read the metric, true-up, and renewal clauses for the costs that compound after signing. Clients get a written position before every vendor conversation and a plain-English memo after it, so the decision stays with the buyer. Where a question is one of legal interpretation rather than commercial strategy, he will say so and recommend counsel — this firm provides commercial and licensing risk advisory, not legal advice.