Presenting Software License Conflicts through Argumentation

Heterogeneously-licensed systems pose new challenges to architects and designers seeking to develop systems with appropriate intellectual property rights and obligations. In the extreme case, license conflicts may prevent a system’s legal use. Our previous work showed that rights, obligations, and conflicts can be calculated. But architects benefit from fuller information than simply (for example) a list of conflicts. In this work we demonstrate an approach for presenting intellectual property results in terms of arguments supporting them. The network of argumentation provides not only an explanation of each conclusion, but also a guide to the tradeoffs available in choosing among design alternatives with different licensing results. The approach has been integrated into the ArchStudio software architecture environment. We present an illustrative example of its use.