What is it about?
The research work is based on the utility of smart contracts for managing terms and conditions of opensource software licenses and also focuses on various License violations on usage of open-source software and the use of blockchain technology that can significantly reduce the risk of such violations while using these software for personal or commercial interests.
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Why is it important?
Most violations occur due to lack of comprehension or little intend to understand the legal verbiage of the License’s terms and conditions by most developers. These developers inadvertently end up violating the software terms and conditions without realizing that these violations pose significant risk to not only the owner of the propriety software but also the user of these software as it can result in lawsuits and most importantly copyright theft or infringement of IP issues. The main objective of this paper is to provide a potential solution that can minimize these risks of violations by using smart contracts in blockchain technology.
Perspectives
I hope this research would create an awareness in the usage of the open-source software terms and conditions as sometimes, as the little intend or confusing terminologies of legal language of software Licenses, one can easily end up violating these terms and conditions. There are various Lawsuits filed for License violation in the past, some of which include violations by big tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Cisco etc. Recent Lawsuit of such violation by Elasticsearch against Amazon generated a lot of interest among open-source community and forced many to re-think the term and conditions of such free licenses that can easily be exploited for commercial interests. We explored opportunities on how blockchain technology can attempt to minimize such violations using smart contracts and thus greatly reduce the risk for lawsuits or IP infringement. More than anything else, and if nothing else, I hope you find this article thought-provoking.
Abhay Kumar
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An approach to Open-Source Software License Management using Blockchain-based Smart-Contracts, February 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3511430.3511448.
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