一句话：首次刻画开源许可证中的修改条款，并提出工具 LiVo 自动检测与修复 Fork 时的违反行为。
开源软件带来便利，也因许可证违反引入诉讼与财务损失等法律风险。已有工作多聚焦许可证识别、冲突/不一致检测与推荐，尚未理解许可证中的修改条款，也未检测或修复 Fork 时的修改条款违反。本文首先对 48 个开源许可证的修改条款进行实证刻画，发现它们均要求以某种“Notice”说明对原作的修改；受此启发设计 LiVo，在 Fork 过程中自动检测并修复修改条款违反。评估显示 LiVo 有效且高效，生成的修复 PR 中 18 个获得积极回应，8 个被合并。
Open source software brings benefit to the software community but also introduces legal risks caused by license violations, which result in serious consequences such as lawsuits and financial losses. To mitigate legal risks, some approaches have been proposed to identify licenses, detect license incompatibilities and inconsistencies, and recommend licenses. As far as we know, however, there is no prior work to understand modification terms in open source licenses or to detect and fix violations of modification terms. To bridge this gap, we first empirically characterize modification terms in 48 open source licenses. These licenses all require certain forms of “notice” to describe the modifications made to the original work. Inspired by our study, we then design LiVo to automatically detect and fix violations of modification terms in open source licenses during forking. Our evaluation has shown the effectiveness and efficiency of LiVo. 18 pull requests for fixing modification term violations have received positive responses. 8 have been merged.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot8463,
title = {Your “Notice” Is Missing: Detecting and Fixing Violations of Modification Terms in Open Source Licenses during Forking},
author = {Kaifeng Huang and Yingfeng Xia and Bihuan Chen and Siyang He and Huazheng Zeng and Zhuotong Zhou and Jin Guo and Xin Peng},
booktitle = {ISSTA},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1145/3650212.3680339}
}