Can you use sourcetrail on properitery codebases as well? I see it's GPL and according to my understanding, it's okay to use it on properitery software as long as you don't make any modifications to the sourcetrail software itself. Are there any hidden commercial licenses before I try it out on my company's codebase?
I’m not a lawyer but if you’re not embedding GPL code output into your code, you’re fine. Using GPL code to write or reason about code under a different license is not the same thing as having GPL software output a copy of its own GPL-licensed code, for example: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5221...
The only other risk is letting your company’s proprietary code be visible by third-parties but Sourcetrail runs locally on your computer and can run completely offline.
As to Sourcetrail’s licensing— it previously had a closed license and was supported by a startup with a number of employees. It recently went open source and can be supported financially through Patreon: https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/
In addition to Sourcetrail, I also recommend adding OpenTelemetry for distributed projects or flame graphs for less distributed ones. Some of the videos Honeycomb.io put together really highlight the value of distributed tracing, such as this one: https://youtu.be/GuIWQ-EF7YE and the OpenTelemetry Collector makes it simple to filter telemetry, route it to services or drop a majority of traces which don’t have exceptions, for example.
One day I hope OpenTelemetry tracing can be baked into any language the way flame graphs tend to enjoy first-class support in Java, and that tools like Sourcetrail can be baked into IDEs such that runtime metadata is available just by hovering your mouse over modules and functions. Kind of like CodeLens shown here, but for understanding the code: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp...
Something like https://www.codestream.com/use-cases/code-documentation works as a social network and documentation hub but doesn’t necessarily bring in production telemetry or models/ontology from code (such as Lattix, but that’s specialized to code organization in a way…) Maybe Project Cortex but for source code? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...
JetBrains Space or GitHub doesn’t yet analyze code beyond dependencies/security issues/CI but might in the future.
Finally, there are tools like https://backstage.io/ which hint at a future where developers build their own infra tools for the rest of the company to use… but that hasn’t extended much into the realm of modelling, documentation or telemetry yet. Folks might be lucky if they have a hosted copy of SourceGraph right now… the future, I think, builds on all of these ideas.