In an ideal world, the provenance and open source licensing clarity of third-party software would be available as easy-to-discover structured data. We are not there yet!

Watch this video where we will review a detailed study on the clarity of licenses documentation practices in 5,000 popular open source software packages and infer the state of licensing clarity globally gained from the insights and statistics of the ClearlyDefined project data gained from massive license scans with the scancode-toolkit. And we will discuss what can be done to improve this situation.

I will present the state of the license documentation clarity in the open source community at large through the lens of:

• the introduction to the license clarity metrics we designed for ClearlyDefined and in the scancode-toolkit

• the presentation of a study of the license clarity of 5000 popular open source projects across multiple programming languages and ecosystems

• an overview of the statistics on license clarity across 10M packages

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