What do developers talk about open source software licensing?

Free and open source software has gained a lot of momentum in the industry and the research community. Open source licenses determine the rules, under which the open source software can be further used and distributed. Previous works have examined the usage of open source licenses in the framework of specific projects or online social coding platforms, examining developers specific licensing views for specific software. However, the questions practitioners ask about licenses and licensing as captured in Question and Answer websites also constitute an important aspect toward understanding practitioners general licenses and licensing concerns. In this paper, we investigate open source license discussions using data from the Software Engineering, Open Source and Law Stack Exchange sites that contain relevant data. We describe the process used for the data collection and analysis, and discuss the main results that can be useful for developers, educators and license authors. Our results indicate that clarifications about specific licenses and specific license terms are required.