Heterogeneously-Licensed System Requirements, Acquisition and Governance
RELAW '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Second International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law
Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research
Understanding the role of licenses and evolution in open architecture software ecosystems
Journal of Systems and Software
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Heterogeneously-licensed systems pose new challenges to analysts and system architects. Appropriate intellectual property rights must be available for the installed system, but without unnecessarily restricting other requirements, the system architecture, and the choice of components both initially and as it evolves. Such systems are increasingly common and important in e-business, game development, and other domains. Our semantic parameterization analysis of open-source licenses confirms that while most licenses present few roadblocks, reciprocal licenses such as the GNU General Public License produce knotty constraints that cannot be effectively managed without analysis of the system's license architecture. Our automated tool supports intellectual property requirements management and license architecture evolution. We validate our approach on an existing heterogeneously-licensed system.