Software was born closed and proprietary, because it was highly dependent on the physical specifics of the computer on which it was executed. This made the software a decisive factor in business competition. The first movement against closed, proprietary software was the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by Stallman in 1985. Since then, this movement has taken root, and many institutions, research centres, and communities have defined their own particular licence. The result has been an explosion of the number of licences. In order to erect a barrier against this proliferation, the OSI founded a commission, the License Proliferation Committee (LPC). Despite the efforts of the LPC, choosing the licence that best fits the specific needs of the programmers is still a very complex activity. For this reason, this contribution aims to reduce the difficulties of that choice. Starting from the work by the LPC, a Bayesian network has been defined with the aim of (1) advising the user that created a software product of a list of open source licences as possible candidates for application to software products, (2 ) describing (to the user) the reasons that led the system to offer such licences, reporting the license text clearly and completely, without neglecting the technical details. In this way users can acquire a degree of knowledge of these types of licences and develop a personal opinion about them.
A probabilistic approach for choosing the best licence in the Eclipse community / P., Di Bitonto; M., Laterza; Maresca, Paolo; T., Roselli; V., Rossano; L., Stanganelli. - STAMPA. - Proc. of the V Workshop of the Eclipse Italian Community:(2010), pp. 53-64. (Intervento presentato al convegno V Workshop of the Eclipse Italian Community tenutosi a Savona nel 30 settembre - 1 ottobre 2010).
A probabilistic approach for choosing the best licence in the Eclipse community
MARESCA, PAOLO;
2010
Abstract
Software was born closed and proprietary, because it was highly dependent on the physical specifics of the computer on which it was executed. This made the software a decisive factor in business competition. The first movement against closed, proprietary software was the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by Stallman in 1985. Since then, this movement has taken root, and many institutions, research centres, and communities have defined their own particular licence. The result has been an explosion of the number of licences. In order to erect a barrier against this proliferation, the OSI founded a commission, the License Proliferation Committee (LPC). Despite the efforts of the LPC, choosing the licence that best fits the specific needs of the programmers is still a very complex activity. For this reason, this contribution aims to reduce the difficulties of that choice. Starting from the work by the LPC, a Bayesian network has been defined with the aim of (1) advising the user that created a software product of a list of open source licences as possible candidates for application to software products, (2 ) describing (to the user) the reasons that led the system to offer such licences, reporting the license text clearly and completely, without neglecting the technical details. In this way users can acquire a degree of knowledge of these types of licences and develop a personal opinion about them.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
