We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

The state of open source licensing clarity

Formal Metadata

Title
The state of open source licensing clarity
Subtitle
And how to make FOSS license discovery a non-issue
Title of Series
Number of Parts
45
Author
License
CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
In an ideal world, the provenance and open source license of third-party software would be available as easy-to-discover structured data. We are not there yet! We will review a detailed study on the clarity of licenses documentation practices in 5,000 popular open source software packages and infer the state of licensing clarity globally gained from the insights and statistics of the ClearlyDefined project data gained from massive license scans with the scancode-toolkit. And we will discuss what can be done to improve this situation. I will present the state of the license documentation clarity in the open source community at large through the lens of: - the introduction to the license clarity metrics we designed for ClearlyDefined and in the scancode-toolkit - the presentation of a study of the license clarity of 5000 popular open source projects across multiple programming languages and ecosystems - an overview of the statistics on license clarity across 10M packages - a specific review of the licensing practices and license clarity statistics in openSUSE packages