License Integration Patterns: Addressing License Mismatches in Component-Based Development

In this paper the authors address the problem of combining software components with different and possibly incompatible legal licenses to create a software application that does not violate any of these licenses while potentially having its own. The authors call this problem the license mismatch problem. The rapid growth and availability of Open Source Software (OSS) components with varying licenses, and the existence of more than 70 OSS licenses increases the complexity of this problem.