Find your Open Source License Now!

Open Source software is widely used from end-users, software engineers and researchers. The license that accompanies such software is very important for its further use and distribution. However, engineers and researchers are many times not able to choose the appropriate license based on the purpose of the product under development due to the lack of sufficient information on the specifics of each license. In this work, we are addressing the above issue by introducing findOSSLicense that recommends appropriate licenses to users. We are employing a hybrid recommendation using constraint-based, content-based and collaborative approaches. Licenses are recommended based on user needs, on the licenses found in similar open source projects and on the licenses used by similar users. A three-phase process that considers different sources of information is used. We have evaluated findOSSLicense using its initial set of users. The results demonstrate the usefulness of findOSSLicense in the license guiding process.