An analysis of open source software licensing questions in Stack Exchange sites

Abstract

Free and open source software is widely used in the creation of software systems, whereas many organisations choose to provide their systems as open source. Open source software carries licenses that determine the conditions under which the original software can be used. Appropriate use of licenses requires relevant expertise by the practitioners, and has an important legal angle. Educators and employers need to ensure that developers have the necessary training to understand licensing risks and how they can be addressed. At the same time, it is important to understand which issues practitioners face when they are using a specific open source license, when they are developing new open source software products or when they are reusing open source software. In this work, we examine questions posed about open source software licensing using data from the following Stack Exchange sites: Stack Overflow, Software Engineering, Open Source and Law. We analyse the indication of specific licenses and topics in the questions, investigate the attention the posts receive and trends over time, whether appropriate answers are provided and which type of questions are asked. Our results indicate that practitioners need, among other, clarifications about licensing specific software when other licenses are used, and for understanding license content. The results of the study can be useful for educators and employers, organisations that are authoring open source software licenses and developers for understanding the issues faced when using licenses, whereas they are relevant to other software engineering research areas, such as software reusability.