Licensing Services: An "Open" Perspective

Though service orientation is an incipient technology, the inherently infinite potentiality of services makes them to proliferate seamlessly, serving in myriad domains. Licensing of services enables to regulate the commercial use and modifications of service, retaining the copyright with owner of the service. With the growing influence of open source initiatives today, it becomes a significant topic to analyze 'open'ing services. In this paper, we present a concept of 'open service' and analyze the implications of open source approach on service licenses. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.