First Results about Motivation and Impact of License Changes in Open Source Projects

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Citation: Robert Viseur, Gregorio Robles (2015) First Results about Motivation and Impact of License Changes in Open Source Projects. Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact: 11th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference, OSS 2015, Florence, Italy, May 16-17, 2015, Proceedings (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_13
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_13
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_13
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): First Results about Motivation and Impact of License Changes in Open Source Projects
Download: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282956832 First Results About Motivation and Impact of License Changes in Open Source Projects
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Summary

Identify 24 open source projects (listed in paper alphabetically from Alfresco to XFree86) that have changed licenses and analyze with four criteria:

  1. application domain
  2. original and new license
  3. projects leaders’ motivation to change
  4. way the license change was conducted and the impact on the open source project

In the paper 4 cases are briefly described: Mozilla, OpenERP, Trolltech and VLC.

Expected benefits from license change are categorized (non-exclusively), with % of applicable projects (listed in paper; 4.2% means one project):

  1. Compatibility (41.7%)
  2. Revenue growth (25%)
  3. Permissiveness (8.3%)
  4. Simplification of license scheme (4.2%)
  5. Relationships to community (4.2%)
  6. Ego-conflict (12.5%)
  7. Adaptation to competitive environment (8.3%)
  8. Partner requirement (8.3%)
  9. Legal argument (8.3%)

Authors identify 3 problems of license change:

  • Incompatibility or strong impact on other projects
  • Allow appropriation not wanted by community
  • Irritate community and lead to fork

Also 3 benefits:

  • Wider distribution
  • More revenue for company
  • Abandonment of fork if change is what community wants

"we found there was often a lack of documentation about the license change procedure (even for well-known projects such as Qt), and that the impact was rarely objectified. We would like to enrich the cases with facts and figures allowing to better quantify the impact of license changes."


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