Understanding and Remediating Open-Source License Incompatibilities in the PyPI Ecosystem
The reuse and distribution of open-source software must be in compliance with its accompanying open-source license. In modern packaging ecosystems, maintaining such compliance is challenging because a package may have a complex multi-layered dependency graph with many packages, any of which may have an incompatible license. Although prior research finds that license incompatibilities are prevalent, empirical evidence is still scarce in some modern packaging ecosystems (e.g., PyPI). It also remains unclear how developers remediate the license incompatibilities in the dependency graphs of their packages (including direct and transitive dependencies), let alone any automated approaches. To bridge this gap, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of license incompatibilities and their remediation practices in the PyPI ecosystem. We find that 7.27% of the PyPI package releases have license incompatibilities and 61.3% of them are caused by transitive dependencies, causing challenges in their remediation; for remediation, developers can apply one of the five strategies: migration, removal, pinning versions, changing their own licenses, and negotiation. Inspired by our findings, we propose SILENCE, an SMT-solver-based approach to recommend license incompatibility remediations with minimal costs in package dependency graph. Our evaluation shows that the remediations proposed by SILENCE can match 19 historical real-world cases (except for migrations not covered by an existing knowledge base) and have been accepted by five popular PyPI packages whose developers were previously unaware of their license incompatibilities.
Tue 12 SepDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
10:30 - 12:00 | Open Source and Software Ecosystems 1Research Papers / Tool Demonstrations at Room E Chair(s): Denys Poshyvanyk William & Mary | ||
10:30 12mTalk | An Empirical Study of Malicious Code In PyPI Ecosystem Research Papers Wenbo Guo School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Zhengzi Xu Nanyang Technological University, Chengwei Liu Nanyang Technological University, Cheng Huang School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Yong Fang School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University Pre-print | ||
10:42 12mTalk | Understanding and Remediating Open-Source License Incompatibilities in the PyPI Ecosystem Research Papers Weiwei Xu Peking University, Hao He Carnegie Mellon University, Kai Gao University of Science and Technology Beijing, Minghui Zhou Peking University Pre-print | ||
10:54 12mTalk | Mitigating Persistence of Open-Source Vulnerabilities in Maven Ecosystem Research Papers Lyuye Zhang Nanyang Technological University, Chengwei Liu Nanyang Technological University, Sen Chen Tianjin University, Zhengzi Xu Nanyang Technological University, Lingling Fan Nankai University, Lida Zhao Nanyang Technological University, Yiran Zhang Nanyang Technological University, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University | ||
11:06 12mTalk | Bus Factor Explorer Tool Demonstrations Egor Klimov JetBrains Research, Muhammad Umair Ahmed Bilkent University, Nikolai Sviridov JetBrains Research, Pouria Derakhshanfar JetBrains Research, Eray Tüzün Bilkent University, Vladimir Kovalenko JetBrains Research Media Attached | ||
11:30 12mTalk | EALink: An Efficient and Accurate Pre-Trained Framework for Issue-Commit Link Recovery Research Papers Chenyuan Zhang Xiamen University, Yanlin Wang Sun Yat-sen University, Zhao Wei Tencent, Yong Xu Tencent, Juhong Wang Tencent, Hui Li Xiamen University, Rongrong Ji Xiamen University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
11:42 12mTalk | Fork Entropy: Assessing the Diversity of Open Source Software Projects' ForksRecorded talk Research Papers Liang Wang Nanjing University, Zhiwen Zheng State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Xiangchen Wu State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Baihui Sang State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Jierui Zhang Nanjing University, Xianping Tao Nanjing University Media Attached |