skip to main content
10.1145/1930488.1930533acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmindtrekConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

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

Published: 06 October 2010 Publication History

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.

References

[1]
Brown, W. J., Malveau, R. C., McCormick III, H. W., and Mowbray. T. J. AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis. John Wiley and Sons, Erewhon, NC, 1998.
[2]
Buschmann et al. Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Vol 1: A System of Patterns. Wiley 1996.
[3]
FOSSology. Available at http://fossology.org/. Last accessed May 2010.
[4]
Fowler M.: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models. Addison. Wesley. 1996.
[5]
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison_Wesley, 1995.
[6]
German, D. and Hassan, A. License integration patterns: Addressing license mismatches in component-based development. 188--198, In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, 2009.
[7]
IEEE Standard 1461--2000.
[8]
OSLC, Open source license checker. Available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/oslc. Last accessed May 2010.
[9]
Rational Software Architect. Available at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/swarchitect/websphere/. Last accessed May 2010.
[10]
Rozanski, N. and Woods, E. Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders using Viewpoints and Perspectives. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005.
[11]
Torvalds, L. GPL only modules, linux-kernel mailing list. December 17, 2006. Available at http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/17/79. Last accessed May 2010
[12]
Tuunanen, T., Koskinen, J. and Kärkkäinen, T. Automated software license analysis. Automated Software Engineering 16 (3--4), 455--490, Dec. 2009.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
MindTrek '10: Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments
October 2010
270 pages
ISBN:9781450300117
DOI:10.1145/1930488
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • Tampere University of Technology
  • UTA: The University of Tampere
  • Tampere University of Applied Sciences

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 October 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. design patterns
  2. legal concerns
  3. open source licensing

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

MindTrek '10
Sponsor:
  • UTA
MindTrek '10: Academic MindTrek 2010
October 6 - 8, 2010
Tampere, Finland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 207 submissions, 53%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)11
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media