Author : Armijn Hemel (Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions)

Title: Tooling for open source software license compliance - 
       challenges in fixing trivial problems


Abstract: Open Source software is everwhere. Its open nature and easy
availability has significantly stimulated software reuse in every
industry, ranging from tax software to avionics. Unfortunately the
license terms are often not very well understood or even ignored,
which can put companies at significant risk. This is especially
visible in consumer electronics, where there have been several
lawsuits in Germany, France and the USA.

These lawsuits were, from an engineering point of view, completely
useless: proper processes and best practices that have been known for
decades in software engineering would have license compliance a
trivial problem. Reality is a bit different: companies often don't
know what is inside software that they buy, how it was made and what
license the software is under. These companies often don't have the
budget to invest in expensive tooling, that often does not even solve
their problem namely finding out what is in the binaries they are
shipping. There is a huge need for cheap, easy and reliable tooling.

In this talk I will briefly touch upon backgrounds about why license
violations happen, where problems occur and where they should be
fixed, plus introduce the Binary Analysis Tool, an Apache 2 licensed
tool for analysing abritrary binary files, such as firmwares,
executables and file systems.

Biography: Armijn Hemel, MSc is the General Manager of Tjaldur
Software Governance Solutions, a company specializing in offering
tooling, training and consultancy in the field of open source software
license compliance and software governance. He has been active in the
gpl-violations.org project since mid 2005, where he has helped resolve
several hundred license violations.