Final Thesis: License Text Viewer for Simplified Open Source Compliance
Abstract: The software development landscape has changed drastically over the years. With an estimated up to 98% of codebases including open-source software (Nagle et al., 2022) and the rise of package managers and development frameworks, it has never been simpler to start incorporating numerous amounts of open-source projects. So simple, in fact, that managing different dependencies’ software licenses went from a cumbersome task to an impossible one, especially when licenses are mentioned in various files outside of dedicated license declarations. This creates a demand for tools that assist in the process of managing license compliance, as carefree misuse of open-source code can quickly turn into a legal liability for companies and private developers alike. This thesis presents a License Text Viewer feature for one such assisting tool: SCA Tool. The License Text Viewer makes recognizing modified licenses and evaluating the impact of the modifications easy by providing the user with the context of the original file of a mentioned license and displaying the difference to the closest unmodified license text in simple and efficient fashion.
Keywords: Application programming interface (API), User experience (UX), Licensing, Open source licensing, SCA Tool
PDF: Bachelor Thesis
Reference: Julian Schütz. License Text Viewer for Simplified Open Source Compliance. Bachelor Thesis. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2025.