Paper Info
Title
Analysis of license inconsistency in large collections of open source projects.
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10664-016-9487-8
Empirical Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software license,Code clone,License inconsistency
Software license,Source code,Computer science,Computer security,Reuse,MIT License,Software,SQALE,Java,Database,License
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
22
3
1382-3256
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.45
22
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuhao Wu1232.07
Yuki Manabe272.52
Tetsuya Kanda3406.70
Daniel M. German4139279.39
Katsuro Inoue52424172.31