Software Intellectual Property Management through Self-Claiming of the Certificate of Origin of the Source Code

With the fast growing of open source software, more and more software is built through the combination of reusable components and its own proprietary code. While open source software is free, it still come with license obligations that must be met. This paper proposes a process of programmers' claims of the certificate of origin (COO) of source code and a workflow of the tool-based verification of claims of COO for the software intellectual property management in a software development project. The experiences of more than five years practice show that the process of self-claiming of COO can help identify software components that could conflict with a project's licensing model early in the software development process, reduce the software rework effort caused by the late detection of inappropriate content, and reduce a company's risk of legal issues.