An analysis of open source software licensing questions in Stack Exchange sites

TL;DR

This study analyzes open source licensing questions on Stack Exchange to understand common issues, trends, and the level of community support, providing insights for educators, developers, and organizations involved in open source software.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of licensing-related questions on multiple Stack Exchange sites, highlighting practitioners' needs and common misunderstandings about open source licenses.

Findings

Practitioners seek clarifications on license specifics and content understanding.

Questions about licensing when integrating multiple licenses are common.

Community provides varying levels of support, with some questions receiving detailed answers.

Abstract

Free and open source software is widely used in the creation of software systems, whereas many organisations choose to provide their systems as open source. Open source software carries licenses that determine the conditions under which the original software can be used. Appropriate use of licenses requires relevant expertise by the practitioners, and has an important legal angle. Educators and employers need to ensure that developers have the necessary training to understand licensing risks and how they can be addressed. At the same time, it is important to understand which issues practitioners face when they are using a specific open source license, when they are developing new open source software products or when they are reusing open source software. In this work, we examine questions posed about open source software licensing using data from the following Stack Exchange sites: Stack Overflow, Software Engineering, Open Source and Law. We analyse the indication of specific licenses and topics in the questions, investigate the attention the posts receive and trends over time, whether appropriate answers are provided and which type of questions are asked. Our results indicate that practitioners need, among other, clarifications about licensing specific software when other licenses are used, and for understanding license content. The results of the study can be useful for educators and employers, organisations that are authoring open source software licenses and developers for understanding the issues faced when using licenses, whereas they are relevant to other software engineering research areas, such as software reusability.