Assisting Developers with License Compliance

Software licensing determines how open source systems are reused, distributed, and modified from a legal perspective. While it facilitates rapid development, it can present difficulty for developers in understanding due to the legal language of these licenses. Because of misunderstandings, systems can incorporate licensed code in a way that violates the terms of the license. Our research first aimed at understanding the rationale of developers in choosing and changing licenses. We also investigated the problem of traceability of license changes. These two studies are fundamental components for understanding problems that developers face so that we can better support developers with licensing. Subsequently, we present our proposed research plan of ensuring license compliance of a system. Our research incorporates techniques from information retrieval, code search, mining software repositories, and previous work on licensing. Our work focuses on the development of a license compliance engine. This engine will not only identify license incompatibilities but it will also recommend strategies for developers to fix the incompatible components to ensure license compliance. Our research aims then to address both the analysis of licenses across dependencies and creating license traceability of byte-code (i.e. provenance). The component will allow us to extend our compliance to include binaries.