Analysis of license inconsistency in large collections of open source projects
| Autor: | Yuhao Wu, Katsuro Inoue, Yuki Manabe, Tetsuya Kanda, Daniel M. German |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Statement (computer science)
Engineering Source code Database Java business.industry media_common.quotation_subject SQALE ComputingMilieux_LEGALASPECTSOFCOMPUTING 020207 software engineering 02 engineering and technology Computer security computer.software_genre Software license Software 020204 information systems 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering MIT License business License computer media_common computer.programming_language |
| Zdroj: | Empirical Software Engineering. 22:1194-1222 |
| ISSN: | 1573-7616 1382-3256 |
| Popis: | Free and open source software (FOSS) plays an important role in source code reuse practice. They usually come with one or more software licenses written in the header part of source files, stating the requirements and conditions which should be followed when been reused. Removing or modifying the license statement by re-distributors will result in the inconsistency of license with its ancestor, and may potentially cause license infringement. In this paper, we describe and categorize different types of license inconsistencies and propose a method to detect them. Then we applied this method to Debian 7.5 and a collection of 10,514 Java projects on GitHub and present the license inconsistency cases found in these systems. With a manual analysis, we summarized various reasons behind these license inconsistency cases, some of which imply potential license infringement and require attention from the developers. This analysis also exposes the difficulty to discover license infringements, highlighting the usefulness of finding and maintaining source code provenance. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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