An Empirical Study of the Reuse of Software Licensed under the GNU General Public License
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software licensing is a complex issue in free and open source software (FOSS), specially when it involves the redistribution of derived works. The creation of derivative works created from components with different FOSS licenses poses complex challenges, particularly when one of the components is licensed under the terms of one of the versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This paper describes an empirical study of the manner in which GPLed licensed software is combined with components under different FOSS licenses. We have discovered that FOSS software developers have found interesting methods to create derivative works with GPLed software that legally circumvent the apparent restrictions of the GPL. In this paper we document these methods and show that FOSS licenses interact in complex and unexpected ways. In most of these cases the goal of the developers (both licensors and licensees) is to further increase the commons of FOSS.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it