LiResolver: License Incompatibility Resolution for Open Source Software

TL;DR

LiResolver is a novel tool that automatically detects and resolves license incompatibility issues in open source projects by understanding license semantics and recommending suitable licenses, thereby easing legal compliance.

Contribution

This work introduces LiResolver, a scalable and flexible system that combines license semantic understanding with automated resolution, including custom license generation, to address license conflicts in OSS.

Findings

Achieved 4.09% false positive rate in incompatibility detection.

Resolved 62.61% of real-world incompatible OSS projects.

Effectively recommends official licenses or generates custom licenses when needed.

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) licenses regulate the conditions under which OSS can be legally reused, distributed, and modified. However, a common issue arises when incorporating third-party OSS accompanied with licenses, i.e., license incompatibility, which occurs when multiple licenses exist in one project and there are conflicts between them. Despite being problematic, fixing license incompatibility issues requires substantial efforts due to the lack of license understanding and complex package dependency. In this paper, we propose LiResolver, a fine-grained, scalable, and flexible tool to resolve license incompatibility issues for open source software. Specifically, it first understands the semantics of licenses through fine-grained entity extraction and relation extraction. Then, it detects and resolves license incompatibility issues by recommending official licenses in priority. When no official licenses can satisfy the constraints, it generates a custom license as an alternative solution. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LiResolver, with 4.09% false positive (FP) rate and 0.02% false negative (FN) rate for incompatibility issue localization, and 62.61% of 230 real-world incompatible projects resolved by LiResolver. We discuss the feedback from OSS developers and the lessons learned from this work. All the datasets and the replication package of LiResolver have been made publicly available to facilitate follow-up research.