2024/03/22 by Nathan Wintersgill, Wintersgill, Nathan, Trevor Stalnaker +7 · 2 voices · 4 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · #Business Law and Ethics #Copyright and Intellectual Property #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Law, AI, and Intellectual Property #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.14927
openalex publication_date 2024/03/22 · arxiv published 2024/03/22 · arxiv updated 2024/03/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Most modern software products incorporate open source components, which requires compliance with each component's licenses. As noncompliance can lead to significant repercussions, organizations often seek advice from legal practitioners to maintain license compliance, address licensing issues, and manage the risks of noncompliance. While legal practitioners play a critical role in the process, little is known in the software engineering community about their experiences within the open source license compliance ecosystem. To fill this knowledge gap, a joint team of software engineering and legal researchers designed and conducted a survey with 30 legal practitioners and related occupations and then held 16 follow-up interviews. We identified different aspects of OSS license compliance from the perspective of legal practitioners, resulting in 14 key findings in three main areas of interest: the general ecosystem of compliance, the specific compliance practices of legal practitioners, and the challenges that legal practitioners face. We discuss the implications of our findings.