The license compliance industry purportedly helps information technology companies and other actors to use publicly available software, and in particular free software, in a way that is compliant with the relevant free software licenses.
In this talk we will review why the license compliance industry exists and discuss, from an external point of view, how it operates. We will then highlight some potential ethical issues on the current best practices for license compliance in the industry, and propose community-oriented alternatives that we can build, today, on top of the existing corpus of publicly available free software.
Speakers: Stefano Zacchiroli