I recently participated in an NII Shonan workshop on open source ecosystems. As a follow-up, we are preparing a book of articles. I’m contributing a chapter on “license clearance in software product governance”. Obviously, open source plays an important role. Please find abstract and paper below.
Abstract: Almost all software products today include open source components. However, the obligations that open source licenses put on their users can be difficult or undesirable to comply with [25] [14] [20]. As a consequence, software vendors and related companies need to govern the process by which open source components are included in their products [21] [7]. A key process of such open source governance is license clearance, that is, the process by which a company decides whether a particular component’s license is acceptable for use in its products [19] [4] [15]. In this article, we discuss this process, review the challenges it poses to software vendors and provide unanswered research questions that result from it.
Read the full paper as HTML or as a PDF. The final reference will be announced once the book has been published.
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