Sharing at Scale: An Open-Source-Software-based License Compliance Ecosystem

The amount of open-source-software (OSS) used in the global software engineering community is already enormous and still growing. This includes both the products we develop and the development tools we use to create them. It is meanwhile rare to find examples of products that do not contain open source components. Although, using open source components in products does have many advantages, it is very important that one also manages the use of the open source components in a license-compliant way. A set of companies and other organizations who either offer or use OSS-based license compliance tools have recently formed the “Open Source Tooling Group”. This international group works on establishing an ecosystem of OSS-based tools for license compliance that fit together well and can offer an ecosystem of tools for organizations to help fulfill their license compliance obligations. This talk provides the motivation and overview of this topic describing the relevance to software engineering practitioners. It will close by highlighting some of the research areas where further improvements could be done in this fast-growing field.