The Open-Source Detector 340
McDutchie writes "With open-source related lawsuits on the rise, a
market is developing for automated tools that detect the presence of open-source code within larger
application development environments.
Palamida Inc.
stepped in with IP Amplifier 3.0,
essentially a search tool and a database that consists of more than 38 million
of the most commonly used open-source files. Something Google-inspired called
CodeRank is claimed to match code against the database. Hmm...
maybe
someone should run it on
this,
or even
this." Of course, some open source code is perfectly welcome in commercial software, even if that software's code is not itself open; it's no secret or surprise that Microsoft, for instance, has taken advantage in some products of BSD-licensed code.
GPL violations! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:windows already has some (Score:4, Insightful)
You have confused Open Source with GPL. There is nothing wrong with using Open Source in applications as long as the license permits it.
Why should Microsoft be singled out for it? Expecially when we had people taking GPL'ed code and selling it as closed source...
No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:GPL violations! (Score:2, Insightful)
Ouch. (Score:1, Insightful)
Okay, I can appreciate the need to protect your intellectual property, but what sort of a control freak will go through megabytes of files to work out if some guy may have used a few lines of your code?
I thought the RIAA was overly protective of their rights, but it seems the open source commuity feels exactly the same way.
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:2, Insightful)
That's fine. Algorithms cannot/should not be copyrighted or patented.
Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective (Score:5, Insightful)
Can anyone explain this to me?
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reputable colleges and universities do exactly that sort of check in CS courses - there are any number of tools designed to check for cheating, and they are not fooled by anything so trivial as changing variable names or swapping a couple statements. They are pretty good at catching cheaters, too.
You are correct in that it can't check "some [random] binary", but this tool was made to run against source.
I'm trying to remember where I'm not allowed to reimplement other people's ideas to begin with, though.
-Erwos
Be careful of FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems to be a resurrection of an old attack strategy, pretend that open source is such an burdensome onerouse license that you have to hunt open source code down like a virus.
Its not something to be encouraged!
sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I just think it's pathetic that we live in an era where people trying to do something nice gets stabbed in the back for it..
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck are you talking about ?
GPL is a based on copyright. You can't copy/paste the code.
Re-implementing the algos is fine, and have always been.
It is 100% FUD to pretend that code become tainted because you looked a GPL source. Don't spread this. Microsoft would LOVE people to beleive that. It would end up like this in interviews:
- Did you contributed to an open-source project ?
- Well, I once fixed a bug in mozilla
- Sorry, our lawyers said we can't hire you
- Why ?
- You would contamine our IP
Repeat after me. GPL is COPYRIGHT. There is no IP involved. There have NEVER been.
Re:Bah... humbug. (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, this is quite an innovative tool, and would save a release or a project manager a lot of headaches in terms of legal compliance.
Re:windows already has some (Score:3, Insightful)
The BSD goal is good code, not open code.
Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective (Score:4, Insightful)
And of course it can be done by examining the memory dump instead of executable file. It must be decrypted to run.
Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't understand how this differs from the BitKeeper situation. Reverse engineering is OK. And it sure is a hell of a lot easier if you get source code.
In fact, if reverse engineering from GPL code was not allowed within the GPL, the GPL could be used by unscrupulous people to protect their algorithms against reverse engineering and reimplementation. Just publish the source code, and no one can ever again claim they had a "clean room" reimplementation.
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Good. So long as all they are doing is gathering ideas there is nothing wrong with that. Its like me reading harry potter and then writing a book about wizards. Of course I should be allowed to.
Next you'll be telling us that someone could just look at an application working and then write their own implementation incorporating some of the same ideas. Should they be stopped from that as well? Oh wait, they can be. That's what software patents are often used for.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The BSD license argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Trolling by submitter (Score:1, Insightful)
Simple... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kjella
Re:The BSD license argument (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell me, when someone at work says "Boy, it's a real monkey on my back" do you find yourself wondering why there is no monkey behind them?
-Eric
Re:windows already has some (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the GPL is more free because it does not permit anyone to take away anyone else's freedom. Say I write some GPL code. You are free to use it, modify it, sell it if you want, but you may not tell any later user or developer that they can't enjoy the same freedoms you have enjoyed.
Scenario 1: Person A writes some GPL code. Person B uses it and modifies it, and releases the code. Everyone else is free to use that code as they wish, as long as they don't try to restrict anyone else's rights.
Scenario 2: Person A writes some BSD-licensed code. Person B uses it, modifies it and starts selling it as a shrink-wrapped product. All his users are restricted by EULAs. They can't have the source code, they can't legally share the program, and they're stuck if B discontinues the product.
In which scenario do you think the licensees have more freedom? It's free as in liberty, not free as in 'free ride'.
Stop thinking small! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that but whenever I've been present when someone has asked the people who wrote the code if it's OK for Microsoft to use it, they didn't say "we can't stop them", they said "we want them to use it".
I don't see how you can possibly come up with a more ethical or moral justification for it than that.
Re:windows already has some (Score:4, Insightful)
It is very simple: the BSD license is more free, because it grants more freedoms.
Yes, to take this to its logical extreme means that anarchy is maximum freedom. No, this would not be a good thing; but by trying to argue that the GPL is more free (when you should have said that it is better for the user of Person A's software) you have already accepted that unlimited freedom isn't such a good thing anyway.
Re:The BSD license argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the GPL spreads out to affect more than just the GPLed code that was originally introduced and its subsequent modifications.
For those in the dark side of the force, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct.
This line of argument seems to be along the lines of "of course you can use GPLed code - just don't get caught", and it's always worried me. Correct me if I'm wrong, I frequently am!
No, that's not what it means. What it means is that the penalties and consequences of violating the GPL are not automatically that your source code itself falls under the GPL. In fact, placing your code under the GPL after the fact is not even sufficient as a legal remedy--it is simply not relevant to anything.
By analogy, if you park in a no-parking zone, the penalty and consequence is not automatically that your car gets towed; maybe you'll get a fine or maybe your car gets disabled instead. And it certainly isn't sufficient for you to say "my bad" and just drive away--you still got a ticket and will have to pay that.
How the copyright holder and how the courts deal with you if you violate the GPL depends on your behavior and on your product. You seem to think that forcing a company to GPL its code is the worst thing that can happen to it if they violate the GPL, but that's not true. On the other hand, that may be too severe a consequence. Either way, changes to the license of the code that was used to violate the GPL after the fact simply aren't relevant to the legal issue of the GPL violation. The only way they may enter is part of a voluntary negotiated settlement, if the copyright holder on the GPL'ed software agrees to accept that as a remedy.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people try to paint the GPL as even more dangerous by claiming that unlike proprietary code where you'd only have to pay damages, the GPL would force you to open up all your code and "take away" all of your "intellectual property".
The point isn't that corporations would be deliberately using code that they don't have a right to use, the point is that a large enough corporation can never trust all of its employees.
Re:No Gurantee Against reimplentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright does not require a cleanroom implementation. Patents do. Open source code is not patented.
Re:The BSD license argument (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't make the office suite mainstream, that was already happening. Sure, it kept happening while they were around, but it's not like they made something happen that wouldn't have otherwise.
OLE and similar technologies aren't bad, but they're nothing the market wasn't exploring at the time. Apple's OS does the same things.
As for the IDE, they do release the most popular, but that's a function of market share. They didn't invent it - the first I used was Borland C in the early 90s and it was a pale copy of what commercial IDEs were on big iron. As for mainstreaming rapid application development... whoa - where to start?
And I'll take issue with your taking issue with my comment on prices. Microsoft's sole price advantage has always been working on commodity hardware. Arguably this is Intel's doing - the cross licensing they did to be a military supplier and the "clone" market this caused made the x86 the defacto standard. Microsoft just rode the cheap Taiwanese hardware market.
Sure, many Microsoft products are now cheap, and many people who couldn't have had an office suite in the 80s now have one, but they'd have one on whatever hardware and OS existed - every type of product Microsoft makes was already around on other platforms. It might have been WordPerfect or Appleworks, but they were already around in the mid 80s and seem to
You simply miss the perspective you'd have gained if you watched the PC revolution unfold instead of listening to Microsoft tell the story.
Seeing as how Microsoft hasn't brought us anything that other companies wouldn't have bought (likely with less criminal actions involved), their anti-open source policies, and their format and licensing lock-in, I stand by my statement that a PC is more costly today and the market worse off than it would have been if Microsoft hadn't become an OS monopoly and illegally leveraged that into market share dominance in other areas.