Analyzing software licenses in open architecture software systems

A substantial number of enterprises and independent software vendors are adopting a strategy in which software-intensive systems are developed with an open architecture (OA) that may contain open source software (OSS) components or components with open APIs. The emerging challenge is to realize the benefits of openness when components are subject to different copyright or property licenses. In this position paper, we identify key properties of OSS licenses, present a license analysis scheme, and discuss our approach for automatically analyzing license interactions.