On license compliance
Today I am participating in a workshop organized by Matt Germonprez. The title of my presentation is:
On the provenance of Free and Open Source Software and the legal implications of its reuse
It is mostly based on this paper A Method for Open Source License Compliance of Java Applications, IEEE Software May-June 2012 (vol. 29 no. 3) (email me if you can’t get a copy).
Intellectual property and software engineering: The use of open source continues to increase in commercial software development. One of the main challenges these organizations face is to fully understand the requirements that the licenses of the open source software impose on software they want to use. In the last few years we have performed empirical studies to try to understand these issues; we have also developed Ninka, a license identification tool for open source licenses (http://ninka.turingmachine.org), and developed methods and tools to help determine the provenance of Java binary files. Recently we have been working with the SPDX initiative towards the definition of a standard to exchange licensing information of software products.
–dmg