Automatic checking of license compliance

Open source software facilitates software reuse as developers can learn from code in existing open source projects. However, license compliance is an important legal issue that should be taken into consideration during open source based software reuse. Ignorance or carelessness could result in huge financial losses. In this paper, we present LChecker, a tool we developed for automatic checking of license compliance. LChecker utilizes Google Code Search service to check whether a local file exists in an OSS project and whether the licenses are compatible. The initial experimental results show that our tool is effective in detecting license compliance problems.