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Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability pp 83–95Cite as

Open-Source License Compliance in Software Supply Chains

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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 [14, 20, 25]. As a consequence, software vendors and related companies need to govern the process by which open-source components are included in their products [7, 21]. 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 [4, 15, 19]. In this article, we discuss this process, review the challenges it poses to software vendors, and provide unanswered research questions that result from it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This article is a follow-up to the NII Shonan Meeting on “Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability” where the first author was tasked with summarizing research questions in the domain of open-source license clearance and software supply chain management.

  2. 2.

    Free Software Foundation, What Is Copyleft? at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues Daniel German and Matti Rossi for the discussions and collaboration at the 2017 workshop on FLOSS ecosystems at Shonan Village, Japan. We also would like to thank Maximilian Capraro, Shane Coughlan, Michael Dorner, Monika Schnizer, and Axel Teichert for their feedback on this article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Dirk Riehle & Nikolay Harutyunyan

Authors
  1. Dirk Riehle
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  2. Nikolay Harutyunyan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dirk Riehle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Brian Fitzgerald

  2. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, USA

    Audris Mockus

  3. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Minghui Zhou

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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. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-7099-1

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