Comment by watwut
24 days ago
This is a non problem. We use libraries with standard licenses and there is finite set of them - like 4. And I work on fairly large software.
If your company has issue achieving this, then it was simply not complying with those licenses.
You can go through all licenses just by checking their list in maven. None of that is hard or expensive.
We have considerably more than 4, some of which are custom works of companies which have been selling under their terms since the 80s. No, I don’t think it’s a huge problem but if you have a lawyer who doesn’t at least want to check, you need a better lawyer.
This is actually something that a law requiring source code releases would end up improving though as those companies would be forced to standardize their licenses or find themselves without customers.