Previous research shows that software reuse can have a positive impact on software development economics, and that the adoption of a specific open source license can influence how a software product is received by users and programmers. This study attempts to bridge these two research areas by examining how the adoption of an open source license affects software reuse. Two reuse metrics were applied to 9,570 software packages contained in the Fedora Linux software repository. Each package was evaluated to determine how many external components it reuses, as well as how many times it is reused by other software packages. This data was divided into subsets according to license type and software category. The study found that, in general, (1) software released under a restrictive license reuse more external components than software released under a permissive license, and (2) that software released under a permissive license is more likely to be reused than software released under a restrictive license. However, there are exceptions to these conclusions, as the effect of license choice on reuse varies by software category. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32778 |
| Date | 08 June 2012 |
| Creators | Brewer, John VIII |
| Contributors | Computer Science, Frakes, William B., Kulczycki, Gregory W., Egyhazy, Csaba J. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | Brewer_John_t_2012.pdf |
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