Tech companies are seeking lawyers who don't just understand open source code -- but know how to balance it with the preservation of intellectual property rights. Some Silicon Valley lawyers have already mastered this balancing act. They've discovered ways to protect IP and innovations while contributing to the open source community engineers and customers are passionate about. The first step to this sense of balance is education, according to Michael Moore, associate general counsel, products and patents for Mountain View, California-based Pure Storage. "Patents and open source are not mutually exclusive," Moore said. "You can do both and do both correctly, but it takes education, especially for people who are newer in the industry." "We make sure that when our engineers start at the company we educate them on our philosophy around patents and open source and the interplay between them, making clear that to us it's not a one or the other, that we support both programs and they actually work together," Myles said. "If you can explain from the business side why [you should be] taking a particular IP strategy in that particular case, you can generally get buy in," Myles said. "Taking a hard line stance one way or the other generally doesn't work."