Hello there!
I’ve been working on a tool to track OSS usage in mobile apps (my academic paper: https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p2169-duanA.pdf). As mobile apps are proprietary (binaries), the tool reverse engineers apps to report SDKs being used.
Curious to know how developers of OSS under copyleft licenses track illegitimate of their OSS today? Any feedback/advice would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
-Ashish
Welcome to the forum!
There have certainly been some projects to detect potential copyleft license violations in public software forges and repositories. I’m not aware of any businesses doing proactive policing that way, though companies producing copyleft code taken up by competitors tend to keep an eye on their further development.
A great deal of the pitch for open license compliance tools and services focuses on avoiding the “GPL in your product” horror story. Some firms pay vendors substantial money to get ahead of those problems defensively.
This is amazing!
Work like this is greatly appreciated! 