Discovering Software License Constraints: Identifying a Binary’s Sources by Tracing Build Processes

Title

Discovering Software License Constraints: Identifying a Binary’s Sources by Tracing Build Processes

 Author

Van der Burg, S.
Davies, J.
Dolstra, E.
German, D.M.
Hemel, A.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

 Department

Software Computer Technology

 Date

2012-12-31

 Abstract

With the current proliferation of open source software components, intellectual property in general, and copyright law in particular, has become a critical non-functional requirement for software systems. A key problem in license compliance engineering is that the legal constraints on a product depend on the licenses of all sources and other artifacts used to build it. The huge size of typical dependency graphs makes it infeasible to determine these constraints manually, while mistakes can expose software distributors to litigation. In this paper we show a generic method to reverse-engineer this information from the build processes of software products by tracing system calls (e.g., open) to determine the composition graph of sources and binaries involved in build processes. Results from an exploratory case study of seven open source systems, which allowed us to discover a licensing problem in a widely used open source package, suggest our method is highly effective.

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bd23b931-827e-497e-8565-5c8e9bc18005

 Publisher

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

 ISSN

1872-5392

 Source

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2012-010

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

report

 Rights

(c) 2012 The Author(s)
Files
PDF TUD-SERG-2012-010.pdf 303.66 KB
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