University of Antwerp - Campus Middelheim - Room G.017 On tuesday, april 2nd we welcome a guest at our university -- prof. Daniel M German an expert in open source systems. Professor German will explain how state-of-the-art software engineering techniques (i.e. mining software repositories) can be used to help open source communities with issues like copyright violations; license infringements and cataloguing license uses. As open source licensing is becoming an essential part of Software Engineering we hereby invite you to this lecture; details are provided below.
Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think may be interested. And apologies for cross-posting.
Prof. Serge Demeyer
WHEN
• Tuesday, April end, 2013; 14:00 - 16:00
WHERE
• University of Antwerp - Campus Middelheim
• Room G.017
TITLE
On the provenance of Free and Open Source Software and the legal implications of its reuse
ABSTRACT
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become an important source of
components to reuse, in both commercial and non commercial software.
While these components are free (i.e. gratis) they are made available
with a license that indicates the conditions under which it can be
used. As a consequence, the license of a component might restrict how
it can be reused. In this talk I'll describe our recent work regarding
reuse of FOSS components:
- The problem of provenance discovery in FOSS. Components are
frequently distributed in binary form, making it difficult to trace
back their origin. In other cases code snippets are copied from one
product to another. I'll describe Joa, a system that is capable of
finding the provenance of Java classes in both binary and source
code form.
- The problem of license compliance and auditing: how to determine if
a software system is satisfying all the legal constraints imposed by
the components it reuses. I'll describe Ninka, a system for license
identification, and a model that puts together Joa and Ninka to do
license compliance of Java applications
BIO
Daniel German is professor of Computer Science at the University of
Victoria. He completed his PhD at the University of Waterloo in
2000. His work spans the areas of software evolution, open source,
intellectual property and computational photography. In 2011 he received
a coveted NSERC Discovery Grant for his work in Intellectual Property
and in 2010 he received a Faculty of Engineering Teaching Excellence
Award at the University of Victoria.
