License Risks from Ad-Hoc Reuse of Code from the Internet

Abstract

Reusing code that is downloadable from the Internet - particularly open source software (OSS) code - in commercial software development is attractive for both firms and their software developers. However, to avoid serious economic and legal consequences for firms, the license obligations of the reused code have to be met. While this risk seems to be manageable in systematic reuse, colloquial evidence suggests that when reusing Internet code in ad-hoc fashion, individual professional software developers sometimes do not treat license obligations properly. Quantitatively investigating this issue, we explore the ad-hoc Internet code reuse of professional software developers with a particular focus on license issues by analyzing a unique global dataset of 869 professional software developers. We find that ad-hoc Internet code reuse has become prevalent in commercial software development. Despite this, when reusing Internet code in ad-hoc fashion, professional software developers appear not to fully account for license issues potentially resulting from their behavior. Moreover, our results point out that professional software developers receive little effective training and information on the topic of Internet code reuse from official channels. Furthermore, professional software developers are on average not fully aware of many common Internet code license obligations, and tend to overestimate their own knowledge. Most firms also do not provide close guardrails to their software developers regarding Internet code reuse through policies. Consequently, a considerable share of professional software developers has violated Internet code license obligations in the past. Based on our findings we discuss practical implications for firms developing software and suggest levers to reduce the economic and legal risks from license violations through professional software developers’ ad-hoc reuse of Internet code.

Keywords: Open Source Software, License Violations, Software Reuse, Code Reuse, Software Development