  Developers usually select different open source licenses to restrain the
conditions of using open source software, in order to protect intellectual
property rights effectively and maintain the long-term development of the
software. However, the open source community has a wide variety of licenses
available, developers generally find it difficult to understand the differences
between different open source license. And existing open source license
selection tools require developers to understand the terms of the open source
license and identify their business needs, which makes it hard for developers
to make the right choice. Although academia has extensive research to the open
source license, but there is no systematic analysis on the actual difficulties
of the developers to choose the open source license, thus lacking a clear
understanding, for this reason, the purpose of this paper is to understand the
difficulties faced by open source developers in choosing open source licenses,
analyze the components of open source license and the affecting factors of open
source license selection, and to provide references for developers to choose
open source licenses.
