About Us

findOSSLicense is an online web application that helps you find an Open Source License that fulfills your needs. The system recommends licenses that are in agreement with your needs, but that is also used in other Open Source programs similar to yours. findOSSLicense gives you complete information for the recommended Licenses including its rights, obligations and additional information. If you need even more information we point you to external websites:

• tldrlegal or

• choosealicense: For more information about the rights and obligations regarding the license

• Open Source Initiative (OSI): For the License Text

This work is maintained by the SEIT) lab of the Department of Computer Science in the University of Cyprus.
The involved researchers are Georgia Charalambous and Georgia M. Kapitsaki.

If you would like to cite this work, please use:
Kapitsaki, Georgia M., and Georgia Charalambous. "Modeling and recommending open source licenses with findOSSLicense." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2019.
Kapitsaki, Georgia M., and Georgia Charalambous. "Find your Open Source License Now!." Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 2016 23rd Asia-Pacific. IEEE, 2016.

About Licenses

Open Source Software is accompanies by one or more licenes that indicate the conditions under which the use of the intellectual property is made feasible. Licenses fall into three main categories:

1. Permissive: have minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed. Examples can be found in the MIT and BSD licenses.

2. Weak copyleft: allow other software to link to the software and be redistributed without the requirement for the work to be distributed under the license. However, changes to the weak-copylefted software itself become subject to the copyleft provisions of such a license. Examples can be found in the LGPL licenses.

3. Strong copyleft: any derivative works, including software outside the original software, need to be made open source under the same license (or a compatible license in some cases). Examples can be found in AGPL and the GPL licenses.

What is a derivative work? If you take the source code of any program and physically modify it, you have created a derivative work of that program. Very slight modifications (e.g. variable name change) may not always constitute a derivative wotk though.

Contact Us

• ISSUES

• Want to report an issue? Use the issue tracker on BitBucket.

• EMAIL

• Contact Georgia Kapitsaki (gkapi_AT_cs.ucy.ac.cy) or Georgia Charalambous (gchara04_AT_cs.ucy.ac.cy)