%0 Conference Proceedings %B 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) %D 2017 %T Do Software Developers Understand Open Source Licenses? %A Almeida, Daniel A. %A Murphy, Gail C. %A Wilson, Greg %A Hoye, Mike %K license %K Survey %X —Software provided under open source licenses is widely used, from forming high-profile stand-alone applications (e.g., Mozilla Firefox) to being embedded in commercial offerings (e.g., network routers). Despite the high frequency of use of open source licenses, there has been little work about whether software developers understand the open source licenses they use. To our knowledge, only one survey has been conducted, which focused on which licenses developers choose and when they encounter problems with licensing open source software. To help fill the gap of whether or not developers understand the open source licenses they use, we conducted a survey that posed development scenarios involving three popular open source licenses (GNU GPL 3.0, GNU LGPL 3.0 and MPL 2.0) both alone and in combination. The 375 respondents to the survey, who were largely developers, gave answers consistent with those of a legal expert’s opinion in 62% of 42 cases. Although developers clearly understood cases involving one license, they struggled when multiple licenses were involved. An analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results of the study indicate a need for tool support to help guide developers in understanding this critical information attached to software components. %B 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) %P 1-11 %8 05/2017 %R 10.1109/ICPC.2017.7 %0 Conference Proceedings %B 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering %D 2017 %T Machine Learning-Based Detection of Open Source License Exceptions %A Vendome, Christopher %A Mario Linares-Vasquez %A Bavota, Gabriele %A Di Penta, Massimiliano %A Daniel M. German %A Poshyvanyk, Denys %K classifier %K empirical studies %K license %K machine learning %X From a legal perspective, software licenses govern the redistribution, reuse, and modification of software as both source and binary code. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses vary in the degree to which they are permissive or restrictive in allowing redistribution or modification under licenses different from the original one(s). In certain cases developers may modify the license by appending to it an exception to specifically allow reuse or modification under a particular condition. These exceptions are an important factor to consider for license compliance analysis since they modify the standard (and widely understood_ terms of the original license. In this work, we first perform a large-scale empirical study on the change history of over 51k FOSS systems aimed at quantitatively investigating the prevalence of known license exceptions and identifying new ones. Subsequently, we performed a study on the detection of license exceptions by relying on machine learning. We evaluated the license exception classification with four different supervised learners and sensitivity analysis. Finally we present a categorization of license exceptions and explain their implications. %B 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering %P 118-129 %8 05/2017 %R 10.1109/ICSE.2017.19 %0 Book Section %B Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact %D 2015 %T First Results About Motivation and Impact of License Changes in Open Source Projects %A Viseur, Robert %A Gregorio Robles %E Damiani, Ernesto %E Frati, Fulvio %E Dirk Riehle %E Wasserman, Anthony I. %K Business model %K Contributor agreement %K intellectual property %K license %K open source %X Free and open source software is characterized by the freedoms and criteria that are warranted by specific licenses. These licenses describe the rights and duties of the licensors and licensees. However, a licensing change may be necessary in the life of an open source project to meet legal developments or to allow the implementation of new business models. This paper examines the motivations and impacts of license changes in open source projects. After a state of the art on the subject, a set of case studies where projects changed their license is presented. Then a set of motivations to change licenses, the ways to legally make this change, the problems caused by this change and a set of benefits of the license change are discussed. %B Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact %S IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology %I Springer International Publishing %V 451 %P 137-145 %@ 978-3-319-17836-3 %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_13 %R 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_13 %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 %0 Conference Paper %B 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2010) %D 2010 %T Towards an Openness Rating System for Open Source Software %A Bein, Wolfgang %A Jeffery, Clinton %K alice %K case study %K contribution %K documentation %K freespire %K galib %K latex %K license %K linux %K linux kernel %K mediaportal %K openness %K openoffice %K opensolaris %K rating %K unicon %X Many open source software projects are not very open to third party developers. The point of open source is to enable anyone to fix bugs or add desired capabilities without holding them hostage to the original developers. This principle is important because an open source project's developers may be unresponsive or unable to meet third party needs, even if funding support for requested improvements is offered.This paper presents a simple rating system for evaluating the openness of software distributions. The rating system considers factors such as platform portability, documentation, licensing, and contribution policy. Several popular open source products are rated in order to illustrate the efficacy of the rating system. %B 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2010) %I IEEE %C Honolulu, Hawaii, USA %P 1 - 8 %@ 978-1-4244-5509-6 %R 10.1109/HICSS.2010.405 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/10-07-04.pdf %0 Conference Paper %B OSS2006: Open Source Systems (IFIP 2.13) %D 2006 %T Retrieving Open Source Software Licenses %A Tuunanen, Timo %A Koskinen, Jussi %A Kärkkäinen, Tommi %K gaim %K license %K license analysis %K maintenance %K mozilla %K reuse %X Open Source Software maintenance and reuse require identifying and comprehending the applied software licenses. This paper first characterizes software maintenance, and open source software (OSS) reuse which are particularly relevant in this context. The information needs of maintainers and reusers can be supported by reverse engineering tools at different information retrieval levels. The paper presents an automated license retrieval approach called ASLA. User needs, system architecture, tool features, and tool evaluation are presented. The implemented tool features support identifying source file dependencies and licenses in source files, and adding new license templates for identifying licenses. The tool is evaluated against another tool for license information extraction. ASLA requires the source code as available input but is otherwise not limited to OSS. It supports the same programming languages as GCC. License identification coverage is good and the tool is extendable. %B OSS2006: Open Source Systems (IFIP 2.13) %S IFIP International Federation for Information Processing %I Springer %P 35 - 46 %G eng %R http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34226-5_4 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Retrieving%20Open%20Source%20Software%20Licenses.pdf %0 Conference Paper %B OSS2005: Open Source Systems %D 2005 %T Legal issues of Open Source Software %A Siewicz, Krzysztof %K cooperation %K copyright law %K freedom %K intellectual property %K legal issue %K license %K open source software %X From the legal standpoint, Open Source amounts to distributing rights and obligations in software license agreements in such a way, that they would (1) both grant users control over the program and (2) facilitate the sharing of improvements. The Open Source idea aims at reversing the process usually referred to as proprietary licensing and equaling the rights of the users with these of the authors. To some extent, it attempts to destroy monopolies created by copyright laws and to prevent them to arise again. There is much in the discussion on the legal issues of Open Source. The first voices came from the programmers who started the movement. %B OSS2005: Open Source Systems %P 320-321 %U http://pascal.case.unibz.it/handle/2038/974 %0 Conference Paper %B 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security %D 2005 %T Stopping spyware at the gate: a user study of privacy, notice and spyware %A N. Good %A Dhamija, R. %A J. Grossklags %A D. Thaw %A Aronowitz, S. %A D. Mulligan %A J. Konstan %K agreement, %K and %K Aspects, %K Design, %K end %K EULA, %K Experimentation, %K Factors, %K Human %K Legal %K license %K notice, %K of %K privacy, %K security %K service, %K spyware, %K terms %K ToS, %K usability, %K user %B 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security %I Association for Computing Machinery %C Pittsburgh, PA %P 43-52 %8 07/2005 %@ 1-59593-178-3 %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Law, Economics and Organization %D 2002 %T The Scope of Open Source Licensing %A Josh Lerner %A Jean Tirole %K developers %K license %K licenses %K permissive %K restrictive %K sourceforge %X This paper is an initial exploration of the determinants of open source license choice. It first enumerates the various considerations that should figure into the licensor's choice of contractual terms, in particular highlighting how the decision is shaped not just by the preferences of the licensor itself, but also by that of the community of developers. The paper then presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of license choice using the SourceForge database, a compilation of nearly 40,000 open source projects. Projects geared toward end-users tend to have restrictive licenses, while those oriented toward developers are less likely to do so. Projects that are designed to run on commercial operating systems and those geared towards the Internet are less likely to have restrictive licenses. Finally, projects that are likely to be attractive to consumers such as games are more likely to have restrictive licenses. %B Journal of Law, Economics and Organization %V 21 %P 20-56 %8 2005 %G eng %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/lernertirole2.pdf