By Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian, OSI, IRILL

The license compliance industry purportedly helps information technology companies and other actors to use publicly available software, and in particular free software, in a way that is compliant with the relevant free software licenses. This talk reviews why the license compliance industry exists and discuss, from an external point of view, how it operates. It also highlights some potential ethical issues on the current best practices for license compliance in the industry, and proposes community-oriented alternatives that we can build, today, on top of the existing corpus of publicly available free software.