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.
Can we trust open source license notice ?
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