Managing license compliance in free and open source software development

License compliance in Free and Open Source Software development is a significant issue today and organizations using free and open source software are predominately focusing on this issue. The noncompliance to licenses in free and open source software development leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. Towards an automated compliance management, we use the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of open source software licenses in a machine interpretable way and propose a novel algorithm that analyzes compatibility between free and open source software licenses. Also, we describe a framework that inductively manages compliance of license clauses in a free and open source software development. We simulate and evaluate the formalized license compliance management by analyzing a real-time open source software project GRASS. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.