“The Law Doesn’t Work Like a Computer”: Exploring Software Licensing Issues Faced by Legal Practitioners

Abstract: Most modern software products incorporate open source components, which requires compliance with each component’s licenses. As noncompliance can lead to significant repercussions, organizations often seek advice from legal practitioners to maintain license compliance, address licensing issues, and manage the risks of noncompliance. While legal practitioners play a critical role in the process, little is known in the software engineering community about their experiences within the open source license compliance ecosystem. To fill this knowledge gap, a joint team of software engineering and legal researchers designed and conducted a survey with 30 legal practitioners and related occupations and then held 16 follow-up interviews. We identified different aspects of OSS license compliance from the perspective of legal practitioners, resulting in 14 key findings in three main areas of interest: the general ecosystem of compliance, the specific compliance practices of legal practitioners, and the challenges that legal practitioners face. We discuss the implications of our findings.