Licy: A Chatbot Assistant to Better Understand and Select Open Source Software Licenses

Giorgos Shittas, Georgia Kapitsaki, Maria Papoutsoglou

2025

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) carries licenses that specify the terms under which the software is made available for use. Various resources are available for software engineers online, in order to assist them in understanding and choosing among the available OSS licenses when creating their software projects. However, these resources lack in the provision of a sense of interactivity to user prompts, which would have been useful for providing guidance in a more familiar manner. In this work, we present our approach for Licy, a chatbot OSS licensing assistant for guiding users with information on specific OSS licenses and for choosing which OSS licenses to use in specific cases. A large number of licenses are supported by the chatbot using the license model offered by choosealicense, focusing on license permissions, limitations and conditions. We describe the design and implementation process of the chatbot and its preliminary evaluation results using chatbot design metrics and a user evaluation. We argue that the chatbot can serve as a starting point for similar interactive assistants for software engineers, and describe its value in that respect.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Shittas G., Kapitsaki G. and Papoutsoglou M. (2025). Licy: A Chatbot Assistant to Better Understand and Select Open Source Software Licenses. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE; ISBN 978-989-758-742-9, SciTePress, pages 573-581. DOI: 10.5220/0013336400003928

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase25,
author={Giorgos Shittas and Georgia Kapitsaki and Maria Papoutsoglou},
title={Licy: A Chatbot Assistant to Better Understand and Select Open Source Software Licenses},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE},
year={2025},
pages={573-581},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013336400003928},
isbn={978-989-758-742-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE
TI - Licy: A Chatbot Assistant to Better Understand and Select Open Source Software Licenses
SN - 978-989-758-742-9
AU - Shittas G.
AU - Kapitsaki G.
AU - Papoutsoglou M.
PY - 2025
SP - 573
EP - 581
DO - 10.5220/0013336400003928
PB - SciTePress