Sharing and reusing FOSS compliance material: OSSelot – The Open Source Curation Database

By Caren Kresse of OSADL
Time: 15:00 Room: S6

Abstract

A major advantage of Free and Open Source software (FOSS) is the possibility to reuse existing components. In industry, such software is normally compiled for use in products, so information on licensing must be collected from source code individually. Nearly all FOSS licenses require license text and copyright notices to be delivered with the software. Depending on the scope of a project and the size and amount of contained FOSS components, extracting such information from source code represents a considerable effort, which partially cancels out the advantage of reusing existing components. Thus, it seems obvious to organize these tasks – just like the development of the software itself – in a community. This realization has led to the idea of a publicly available curation database for FOSS compliance information, so that such materials can be shared for reuse and unnecessary parallel work is avoided. In addition to data creation and review, organizational and legal aspects, such as trustworthiness, liability and automated use of the data, must also be considered. This contribution presents OSSelot, a community project that creates and manages a curation database, with a focus on embedded systems.

Biography

Caren Kresse holds a Master degree in Physics and has used and appreciated the large amount of Open Source software already during her studies. For several years she has been working in compliance and technology for the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) eG, overseeing various projects. Her specialties include the legal and practical application of Open Source software in industry as well as conducting workshops and trainings on this topic.