Open source legality patterns: architectural design decisions motivated by legal concerns

  • Authors:

  • Imed Hammouda;Tommi Mikkonen;Ville Oksanen;Ari Jaaksi

  • Affiliations:

  • Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland;Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland;Aalto University, Aalto, Finland;Nokia, Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Complications emerge when various open source software components, governed by different licenses, are used in the same software system. For various reasons, these licenses introduce different privileges and requirements on the use and distribution of composed code, and are therefore often fundamentally incompatible with each other when combined arbitrarily. Consequently the way the different components can be integrated requires attention at the level of software architecture. In this paper, we introduce open source legality patterns -- architectural design decisions motivated by legal concerns associated with open source licensing issues and licenses themselves. Towards the end of the paper, we also review some related work and discuss why it is important to create common guidelines for designs that mix and match different open source systems and proprietary software, and provide directions for future work.