开源许可证的选择:挑战和影响因素

开发者通常会为其开源代码选择不同的开源许可证来约束其使用条件,以期能有效地保护知识产权和维持软件的长远发展.然而,现有的开源许可证种类繁杂,开发者难以了解不同开源许可证间的差异,并且难以通过现有的开源许可证选择工具做出合适的选择——其使用要求开发者了解开源许可证相关条款并明确自己的业务需求.学术界虽然对开源许可证已有研...

Selection of Open Source License: Challenges and Influencing Factors

Developers usually select different open source licenses to restrain the conditions of using open source software, in order to protect intellectual property rights effectively and maintain the long-term development of the software. However, the open source community has a wide variety of licenses available, developers generally find it difficult to understand the differences between different open source licenses. And existing open source license selection tools require developers to understand the terms of the open source license and identify their business needs, which makes it hard for developers to make the right choice. Although there has been extensive research on open source license, there is no systematic analysis on the actual difficulties of the developers to choose the open source license, thus lacking a clear understanding, for this reason, this paper attempts to understand the difficulties faced by open source developers in choosing open source licenses, analyze the components of open source license and the factors influecing open source license selection, and to provide references for developers to choose open source licenses. In this paper, we conduct a random survey of 200 developers that participated in the open source projects on GitHub through questionnaires. With a Thematic Synthesis on the 53 feedbacks, we found that developers often faced difficulties in the selection of open source licenses in terms of complexity of terms and unknown considerations. By analyzing the ten open source licenses most widely used in 3,346,168 repositories on GitHub, we created a framework of open source licenses that contains 10 dimensions. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we put forward 9 factors that affect license selection from three aspects:behavior attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control. The relevance of those factors was verified by developer survey. Furthermore, the relationship between project characteristics and license selection is verified by fitting the order regression model. The results of our research can deepen developers'' understanding of the contents of open source licenses, provide decision support for developers to select appropriate licenses based on their own needs and provide a reference for implementing open source license selection tools based on developers'' needs.