Since last January, I'm an active user of Fossology. Performing source code license analysis, I was surprised by the large number of open source projects combining ASL and GPL v2 components. Those two licenses are known to be incompatible because of patent license termination, and we can wonder if most open source projects get concerned by licence compatibility issue.
In “real life” study, the only license reference of a component was found on the sourceforge summary page without any other copyright or license notice in source code and release. And for another component of the same software, we found 4 notices of different licence in documentation, sourceforge page, project home page and source code ...
Definitely, tools like Fossoloy are opening a new field within open source communities around trust in license notice, and compatibility issues.
grouss's blog
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Is big brother watching you ?
During my last talk at FOSDEM 2008 research room on "open research issues toward a legal framework for open source software", I have got question about Freedom restriction induced by tools like Fossology.
Since Richard Stallman used copyright law as an instrument to grant some fundamental freedoms, leading to "copyleft", we all know that legal constraints can be useful and part of the open source success story.