Analysis of open source license selection for the GitHub programming community

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges faced by developers in selecting open source licenses on GitHub, analyzing license components and influencing factors to aid better decision-making.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis of developers' difficulties and the factors affecting open source license choices, filling a gap in existing research.

Findings

Developers face significant difficulties understanding license differences.

License selection is influenced by multiple factors including project type and developer needs.

The study offers insights to improve license selection tools and guidance.

Abstract

Developers usually select different open source licenses to restrain the conditions of using open source software, in order to protect intellectual property rights effectively and maintain the long-term development of the software. However, the open source community has a wide variety of licenses available, developers generally find it difficult to understand the differences between different open source license. And existing open source license selection tools require developers to understand the terms of the open source license and identify their business needs, which makes it hard for developers to make the right choice. Although academia has extensive research to the open source license, but there is no systematic analysis on the actual difficulties of the developers to choose the open source license, thus lacking a clear understanding, for this reason, the purpose of this paper is to understand the difficulties faced by open source developers in choosing open source licenses, analyze the components of open source license and the affecting factors of open source license selection, and to provide references for developers to choose open source licenses.