An insight into license tools for open source software systems

TitleAn insight into license tools for open source software systems
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsKapitsaki, GM, Tselikas, ND, Foukarakis, IE
Secondary TitleJournal of Systems and Software
Volume102
Pagination72 - 87
Date Published04/2015
ISSN Number01641212
Keywordsflossmole cited
Abstract

Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has gained a lot of attention lately allowing organizations to incorporate third party source code into their implementations. When open source software libraries are used, software resources may be linked directly or indirectly with multiple open source licenses giving rise to potential license incompatibilities. Adequate support in license use is vital in order to avoid such violations and address how diverse licenses should be handled. In the current work we investigate software licensing giving a critical and comparative overview of existing assistive approaches and tools. These approaches are centered on three main categories: license information identification from source code and binaries, software metadata stored in code repositories, and license modeling and associated reasoning actions. We also give a formalization of the license compatibility problem and demonstrate the role of existing approaches in license use decisions.

Notes

"An additional tool can be found in FLOSSmole ( Howison et al., 2006), which is a central repository containing data and analyses about FLOSS projects collected and prepared in a decentralized manner. Content from FLOSSmole was intended to be used for the construction of an intelligent information system for FLOSS, namely FLOSSWALD (Hanft and Reichle, 2007). "

URLhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121214002945
DOI10.1016/j.jss.2014.12.050
Short TitleJournal of Systems and Software
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