Software Licensing

The freedom to view a program's source code is preserved by licensing this program' with a free source license. Free and open software licenses often contain clauses that cause them to be incompatible with other software licenses. Thus, if a program is created from sources licensed under a variety of software licenses, it is important to identify the entire set of licenses applicable to this program, so that this set of licenses may be examined for conflicts. These pages describe a software toolkit that examines a program and the sources from which this program was built and produces the full set of software licenses applicable to this program. The toolkit also flags missing and potentially conflicting licenses. The intent of this toolkit is to promote an awareness of the sources from which a program is built and the software licenses applicable to this program. This toolkit is not warranted in any way. In particular, it cannot make determinations as to the legality of any combination of software licenses for any program.

The License Compliance Toolkit (LCT) was written in the spring of 2003 by Anna Petersen, Angelina Todorova, and myself (Pete Nordqust). This work fulfilled part of the undergraduate graduation requirements for the SOU computer science BS degree earned by both Anna and Angelina in 2003.

Paper published in the CCSC Northwest Conference Procedings, October, 2003.