OSLiFe-DiSC: Open source licenses discovering, selecting and comparing

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) developers should choose an open source license for their software, otherwise it falls under default copyright even if it is hosted in a public repository. Several developers reuse available pieces of open source software in order to build their own one, called derivative software. However, they are not fully aware about the terms implied by that piece of software license or by the license they chose for the software they are building when it is redistributed. This paper presents OSLiFe-DiSC, a tool that helps OSS developers in understanding open source licenses terms. It allows (1) to discover open source licenses legal terms through a categorization of the main features characterizing them, (2) to select an open source license satisfying given features, and (3) to compare any two licenses to understand the differences.

Keywords

• Open source licenses
• OSI approved
• Open source software
• Understand
• Select
• Compare