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. As a consequence, software vendors and related companies need to govern the process by which open-source components are included in their products. 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. In this article, we discuss this process, review the challenges it poses to software vendors, and provide unanswered research questions that result from it.
Keywords: Open source licenses, open source license compliance, software supply chain, product model
Reference: Riehle, D., & Harutyunyan, N. (2019). Open-Source License Compliance in Software Supply Chains. In Fitzgerald B., Mockus A., Zhou M. (eds) Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability. Springer, Singapore, pp 83-95.
A preprint of the paper is available as a PDF file and as a web page. Alternatively, you can pay Springer for the final version.
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