An Investigation into the Impact of Software Licenses on Copy-and-paste Reuse among OSS Projects

Yu, Kexun; Hayase, Yasuhiro; Yoshida, N.; Manabe, Yuki; Inoue, Katsuro

doi:10.1109/wcre.2011.14

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Copyleft, also cited in [21] and [22] is the process of granting the right to freely use the intellectual property under the assumption that the user will do the same with their modifications. It supports the argument from [19] that a legal issue with greater adoption of reusing is licensing agreement which may force the user to share their modifications, something which they look to protect for business success.…”

Section: Legal Issuessupporting

confidence: 61%

“…In some cases, it means the developers that use OSS may require legal assistance to ensure they comply with all the licensing agreements. Failure to do this can result in legal action from the original author, and so OSS assets should be caveated with the note that they are still under the legal ownership of the author who has the right to take legal action if deemed necessary [19]. This can be a time-consuming process when a developer uses several reused components in their final version from several different authors.…”

Section: Legal Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

Tariq¹

2020

JSEA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The main objective of this research is to discuss the current legal and methodological issues in the field of software Re-Usability. Though there are enormous online forums discussing such issues via Q&A but this paper is an attempt to raise the awareness about the legal issues, which a software engineer may trap into. The paper discussed the current issues with software reusability within the legal and methodological context. This paper applied an extensive literature review to critically appraise the past studies to come to a collective conclusion. Prior to discussing the issues, the benefits of reuse were mentioned, including the saving of time and cost for users. But legally the reuse of software assets creates complexities for the user in relation to meeting all the licensing requirements and dealing with the liability in case of a breach. Methodologically, there are major barriers to reused software when it comes to technical competence and managerial issues such as a lack of resources. Even when reusing software to save time, and leverage off the specialization of other authors, the end-user must also have the technical expertise to search, adapt and merge these reusable assets into the larger software infrastructure. The review ultimately shows the high barriers still remain to software reuse which could mean that smaller developers and businesses will still be reluctant to fully utilize open-source components to the best advantage.

show abstract

Section: Legal Issuessupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: Legal Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

Tariq¹

2020

JSEA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several existing studies report that OSS license has an impact on software developments. Kashima et al [19] studied what licenses of source files have impact on software reuse by copy and paste. Colazo et al [20] studied the relations between OSS licenses and project activities.…”

Section: Oss License and Software Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automating License Rule Generation to Help Maintain Rule-based OSS License Identification Tools

Higashi

Ohira

Manabe

2023

Journal of Information Processing

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many license identification tools have been proposed to support OSS reuse. License identification tools automatically identify OSS licenses declared in source files. Ninka is one of the most accurate license identification tools. Because OSS licenses are often newly created or inherited, rules built into license identification tools need to be created and updated on a regular basis. However, when a large number of unknown licenses are detected in large OSS products, it is not easy to manually create new rules. In our previous studies, we proposed a method for clustering license statements that Ninka determined to be unknown. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate license rules from the clustered license statements. Our approach further filters the license statements from the created clusters to extract sequential patterns and converts the extracted patterns into regular expressions. We conducted conduct a case study where our method is applied to 1,821, 3,561 and 2,838 unknown license statement files respectively collected from FreeBSD v10.3.0, Linux Kernel v4.4.6, and Debian v7.8.0, to confirm the usefulness of our method. As a result, we confirmed that our method successfully generated license rules that take into consideration the orthographical variants and that our method also efficiently identified licenses with a small number of license rules. Furthermore, we found that adding the license rules generated by our method to Ninka improves the licensing rule performance.

show abstract

“…There are many studies on the origin, maintenance, and evolution of clones [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Others have concentrated on their lifespan and genealogy [41].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowdsourcing Identification of License Violations

Lee

Germán

Hwang³

et al. 2015

Journal of Computing Science and Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Free and open source software (FOSS) has created a large pool of source codes that can be easily copied to create new applications. However, a copy should preserve copyright notice and license of the original file unless the license explicitly permits such a change. Through software evolution, it is challenging to keep original licenses or choose proper licenses. As a result, there are many potential license violations. Despite the fact that violations can have high impact on protecting copyright, identification of violations is highly complex. It relies on manual inspections by experts. However, such inspection cannot be scaled up with open source software released daily worldwide. To make this process scalable, we propose the following two methods: use machine-based algorithms to narrow down the potential violations; and guide non-experts to manually inspect violations. Using the first method, we found 219 projects (76.6%) with potential violations. Using the second method, we show that the accuracy of crowds is comparable to that of experts. Our techniques might help developers identify potential violations, understand the causes, and resolve these violations.

show abstract

An Investigation into the Impact of Software Licenses on Copy-and-paste Reuse among OSS Projects

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

Automating License Rule Generation to Help Maintain Rule-based OSS License Identification Tools

Crowdsourcing Identification of License Violations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

An Investigation into the Impact of Software Licenses on Copy-and-paste Reuse among OSS Projects

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological &amp; Legal Issues

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological &amp; Legal Issues

Automating License Rule Generation to Help Maintain Rule-based OSS License Identification Tools

Crowdsourcing Identification of License Violations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues