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Managing license compliance in free and open source software development

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Abstract

License compliance in Free and Open Source Software development is a significant issue today and organizations using free and open source software are predominately focusing on this issue. The non-compliance to licenses in free and open source software development leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. Towards an automated compliance management, we use the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of open source software licenses in a machine interpretable way and propose a novel algorithm that analyzes compatibility between free and open source software licenses. Also, we describe a framework that inductively manages compliance of license clauses in a free and open source software development. We simulate and evaluate the formalized license compliance management by analyzing a real-time open source software project GRASS.

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Notes

  1. United States Pub. L. No. 107-204, 116 Stat. 745.

  2. www.isaca.org/cobit.htm

  3. www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

  4. http://grass.osgeo.org/

  5. The article 105 states that works of art realized by US public institutions—such as the Army—are not eligible to copyright protection and therefore fall in the Public Domain.

  6. The public domain license is used by 0.6% of all FOSS projects listed on ohloh, a popular directory of FOSS projects.

  7. http://www.opendwg.org/

  8. http://www.osgeo.org

  9. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

  10. http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html

  11. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

  12. http://harmony.apache.org/bulk_contribution_checklist.txt

  13. http://www.eclipse.org/org/

  14. http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html

  15. http://www.eclipse.org/legal/committer_process/EclipseIndividualCommitterAgreementFinal.pdf

  16. http://www.eclipse.org/legal/EclipseMemberCommitterAgreementFinal.pdf

  17. http://www.blackducksoftware.com

  18. http://www.palamida.com

  19. http://fossology.org/

  20. http://www.qualipso.org

  21. http://www.openbrr.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=104

  22. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Novay, Enschede, The Netherlands

    G. R. Gangadharan

  2. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Vincenzo D’Andrea

  3. National University of Ireland Maynooth, Maynooth Co. Kildare, Ireland

    Stefano De Paoli

  4. Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    Michael Weiss

Authors
  1. G. R. Gangadharan
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  2. Vincenzo D’Andrea
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  3. Stefano De Paoli
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  4. Michael Weiss
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to G. R. Gangadharan.

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Gangadharan, G.R., D’Andrea, V., De Paoli, S. et al. Managing license compliance in free and open source software development. Inf Syst Front 14, 143–154 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-009-9180-1

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