Evolutional analysis of licenses in FOSS

Manabe, Yuki; Hayase, Yasuhiro; Inoue, Katuro

doi:10.1145/1862372.1862391

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Purpose Dataset German et al [13] Investigate the presence of license incompatibilities 3,874 packages Di Penta et al [10] Investigate license evolution during a system's maintenance and evolution 6 systems German et al [15] Investigate the way in which developers address incompatible licensing 124 systems German et al [14] Investigate licensing between copied code fragments in Linux and two BSD distributions 3 systems Manabe et al [20] Investigate license change patterns within FOSS systems 4 systems Singh et al [25] Investigate the reasons for the adoption of a particular FOSS license 5,307 projects Sojer et al [27] Investigate reuse and legal implication of Internet code 686 developers Sojer et al [26] Investigate FOSS code reuse 869 developers Vendome et al [30] Investigate license usage and changes in FOSS systems and the rationale in the revision history and issue tracker 16,221 systems 2) Developers have strong intrinsic beliefs that affect their choice of licenses. Also, open source foundations, such as the Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and the Eclipse Software Foundation exert a powerful influence on the choice of a license; 3) We observed that the change of a license(s) of a system is predominantly influenced by the need to facilitate reuse (mostly in commercial systems); 4) Developers experience difficulties in understanding the licensing terms and dealing with incompatible licenses.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors investigated 3,874 packages of the Fedora-12 Linux distribution and they confirmed a subset of licensing issues with the developers at Fedora. Manabe et al [21] analyzed FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Eclipse, and ArgoUML in order to identify changes in licensing. The authors found that each of the four projects exhibited different patterns of changes in licensing.…”

Section: B Empirical Studies On Licenses Adoption and Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

When and why developers adopt and change software licenses

Vendome

Linares‐Vásquez

Bavota

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Software licenses legally govern the way in which developers can use, modify, and redistribute a particular system. While previous studies either investigated licensing through mining software repositories or studied licensing through FOSS reuse, we aim at understanding the rationale behind developers' decisions for choosing or changing software licensing by surveying open source developers. In this paper, we analyze when developers consider licensing, the reasons why developers pick a license for their project, and the factors that influence licensing changes. Additionally, we explore the licensing-related problems that developers experienced and expectations they have for licensing support from forges (e.g., GitHub).Our investigation involves, on one hand, the analysis of the commit history of 16,221 Java open source projects to identify the commits where licenses were added or changed. On the other hand, it consisted of a survey-in which 138 developers informed their involvement in licensing-related decisions and 52 provided deeper insights about the rationale behind the actions that they had undertaken. The results indicate that developers adopt licenses early in the project's development and change licensing after some period of development (if at all). We also found that developers have inherent biases with respect to software licensing. Additionally, reuse-whether by a non-contributor or for commercial purposes-is a dominant reason why developers change licenses of their systems. Finally, we discuss potential areas of research that could ameliorate the difficulties that software developers are facing with regard to licensing issues of their software systems.

show abstract

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Empirical Studies On Licenses Adoption and Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When and why developers adopt and change software licenses

Vendome

Linares‐Vásquez

Bavota

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, not all of the source code files in an application are not under the same license [5], [6]. In addition, files with the same name or the same content may have different licenses.…”

Section: License Inconsistencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, we downloaded the source code of Debian 7.5 from its official site 5 . The main characteristics of our target project Debian7.5 is shown in Table VI.…”

Section: A Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Method to Detect License Inconsistencies in Large-Scale Open Source Projects

Manabe

Kanda

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The reuse of free and open source software (FOSS) components is becoming more and more popular. They usually contain one or more software licenses describing the requirements and conditions which should be followed when been reused. Licenses are usually written in the header of source code files as program comments. Removing or modifying the license header by re-distributors will result in the inconsistency of license with its ancestor, and may potentially cause license infringement. But to the best of our knowledge, no research has been devoted to investigate such kind of license infringements nor license inconsistencies. In this paper, we describe and categorize different types of license inconsistencies and propose a feasible method to detect them. Then we apply this method to Debian 7.5 and present the license inconsistencies found in it. With a manual analysis, we summarized various reasons behind these license inconsistencies, some of which imply license infringement and require the attention from the developers. This analysis also exposes the difficulty to discover license infringements, highlighting the usefulness of finding and maintaining source code provenance.

show abstract

“…All other open source licensing forces modifications to their asset to be submitted back with the same original license, whereas BDS/Apache-like licenses do not have such requirements [24].…”

Section: Definition Of Open Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%