Understanding industry requirements for FLOSS governance tools

Abstract

Almost all software products today incorporate free/libre, and open source software (FLOSS) components. Companies must govern their FLOSS use to avoid potential risks to their intellectual property resulting from the use of FLOSS components. A particular challenge is license compliance. To manage the complexity of license compliance, companies should use tools and well-defined processes to perform these tasks time and cost efficiently. This paper investigates and presents common industry requirements for FLOSS governance tools, followed by an evaluation of the suggested requirements by matching them with the features of existing tools. We chose 10 industry leading companies through polar theoretical sampling and interviewed their FLOSS governance experts to derive a theory of industry needs and requirements for tooling. We then analyzed the features of a governance tools sample and used this analysis to evaluate two categories of our theory: FLOSS license scanning and FLOSS in product bills of materials. The result is a list of FLOSS governance requirements based on our qualitative study of the industry, evaluated using the existing governance tool features. For higher practical relevance, we cast our theory as a requirements specification for FLOSS governance tools.