%0 Conference Proceedings %B 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering %D 2015 %T A Large Scale Study of License Usage on GitHub %A Vendome, Christopher %K github %K license %X The open source community relies upon licensing in order to govern the distribution, modification, and reuse of existing code. These licenses evolve to better suit the requirements of the development communities and to cope with unaddressed or new legal issues. In this paper, we report the results of a large empirical study conducted over the change history of 16,221 open source Java projects mined from GitHub. Our study investigates how licensing usage and adoption changes over a period of ten years. We consider both the distribution of license usage within projects of a rapidly growing forge and the extent that new versions of licenses are introduced in these projects. %B 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering %I ACM/IEEE %V 2 %P 772-774 %8 05/2015 %6 2