Understanding the role of licenses and evolution in open architecture software ecosystems

The role of software ecosystems in the development and evolution of heterogene-ously-licensed open architecture systems has received insufficient consideration. Such systems are composed of components potentially under two or more li-censes, open source or proprietary or both, in an architecture in which evolution can occur by evolving existing components, replacing them, or refactoring. The software licenses of the components both facilitate and constrain the system’s ecosystem and its evolution, and the licenses ’ rights and obligations are crucial in producing an acceptable system. Consequently, software component licenses and the architectural composition of a system determine the software ecosystem niche where a systems lies. Understanding and describing software ecosystem niches is a key contribution of this work. A case study of an open architecture software system that articulates different niches is employed to this end. We examine how the architecture and software component licenses of a composed system at design-time, build-time, and run-time help determine the system’s software ecosystem niche and provide insight and guidance for identifying and selecting potential evolutionary paths of system, architecture, and niches