Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed source software?

Posted by limonkufu on Thursday August 09, 2018 @03:08PM
from the ask-hn dept.

How can one check whether a closed source commercial software using an open source code while infringing the code's license?

( 5 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed ... by jrpt on Saturday August 11, 2018 @03:10PM (#17741071)

Can you describe what you're trying to do better? Is it your open source code and you want to know who's using it? Or is it your closed source code and you want to know the licensing of everything you're using?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed ... by tobylane on Thursday August 09, 2018 @04:25PM (#17728145)

Bugs and symbols. There's a mac command line tool I can't remember the name of that pulls all the readable (and more) text from an application, this has been used to find out what made a closed source app (e.g. private iOS apis).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed ... by blcArmadillo on Thursday August 09, 2018 @05:35PM (#17728721)

Is it maybe the strings utility: https://linux.die.net/man/1/strings?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed ... by rl1987 on Saturday August 11, 2018 @03:22AM (#17738733)

There's also nm(1) and objdump(1).

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Re:Ask HN: How do you detect license infringement on closed ... by istumbler on Saturday August 11, 2018 @05:48PM (#17741753)

There are also tools which are platform specific. On macOS, for e.g., the Mach-O format can be disassembled by `otool`, for objective-c projects (and maybe Swift) you can use `class-dump`

[ Parent | on HN ]