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You can escalate to legal for edge cases, but you should be able to handle base cases yourself. As an example, I work at Google on an Apache 2.0-licensed open s

You can escalate to legal for edge cases, but you should be able to handle base cases yourself. As an example, I work at Google on an Apache 2.0-licensed open source project, and we have dozens of third party dependencies: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/core/build.gradle https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/core/build.gra... It wouldn't remotely scale across Google if we had to escalate to legal every single time we pulled in a new dependency. Instead, there's a company-wide allowlist of accepted software licenses, and you only need legal help for exceptions beyond that. So yes, we do have to know some basics of software licensing. It's just part of being a SWE.

orf 5y ago
So a SWE just needs to see if the set of allowed licenses contains the project license. That doesn’t require any knowledge of the license itself, other than “they exist”.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  It does though. Like why waste time if you know a viral GPL-style license or a patent encumbered license would be a no go? This is akin to saying SWE’s don’t need to understand GDPR, COPA, HIPPA, DMCA or whatever. Obviously there might be cases where someone never touches code in a GDPR or HIPPA context. But any SWE working in those areas should damn well understand the basics of the law — at least enough to flag inadvertent, but none the less blatant violations.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    SWEs are all Star Wars trivia nerds, surely they can handle a few software licenses and GDPR rules and stuff.