The lack of trust and confidence in Components based software (CBS) is partly due to the extreme diversity of licenses and other Intellectual property rights (IPR) attached to the available components together with the difficulty to identify these components in a large project. This uncertainty is reinforced for collaboratively developed software (CDS), for which large numbers of contributors, with various profiles, are jointly developing software, sometimes from different countries with different applicable laws.

However, improving the legal quality and legal safety at reasonable costs of components or components based software released under open source license, is globally considered as a key issue for the software industry as well as for open source software editors or/and users.

The present deliverable is aiming at providing a general, conceptual framework for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) tracking management of Components Based and Collaboratively Developed software.

In this framework the CBS exploitation is simply viewed as a "licensing out" process of the developed CBS which is related to a compliant "licensing in" process of reuse components.

This framework is presented as a methodology to track IPR along the software Product Life Cycle. It is a contribution to a difficult issue that does not pretend to be a universal solution, but a way to address the problem that is aiming to highlight some key dimensions of it and to show some standardisation needs (such as license denomination). The methodology presented here has been designed to be used in diverse organisations each having its governance (management) structure and using different tools and development environments.