Electronic – How to detect open-source licence violations by companies

licensingopen source

Let's say I have an open source project with a license that prohibits commercial uses. Then comes along a commercial product with striking similarities in functionality/hardware.

How would I go about inspecting the commercial product to see if they are using parts of my source code?
- I realize I could do an image dump, but is that really useful, or easily obfuscated?
Are there any simple tricks I could use, such as adding strange corner case behaviors, that would allow me to easily detect if anyone has copied the source verbatim, and are not overly obvious?

Bonus legal question: can I somehow subpoena the source code, if so what do I need to have to present 'reasonable doubt'?

Best Answer

Perhaps try this: http://www.binaryanalysis.org/en/home

For the legal question, I would try emailing the Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

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Electronic – Looking for a open-source ALU

As a processor guy and designer of an open-source microprocessor, I can tell you that it will be difficult to find what you are looking for.

Multiplication, subtraction and addition are very doable in hardware but irrational numbers, arbitrary powers and division are difficult if not infeasible to do in digital hardware. It may be easier to do it in analogue electronics if your equations have a tolerance for errors. Otherwise, you will need to come up with some tricks to get what you need.

If performance is not critical, you would be better served by doing it in software.

From this and some of your other questions, I think that you may need to re-define your problem or come up with a better alternative that does not rely so much on complicated math.

It may not be possible to do what you need, in hardware and you may need to resort to software emulation instead.

Electronic – BSD style Open Source alternatives to CMSIS

Many of the CMSIS software components are now released under a BSD license.

In the official CMSIS package, this is the relevant content of the "CMSIS END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT.pdf":

The package also includes the components contained in the following directories:
(a) ./CMSIS/DSP_Lib - DSP Library sources and examples;
(B) ./CMSIS/Include - Header files;
(c) ./CMSIS/Lib - DSP Library build for various toolchains;
(d) ./CMSIS/RTOS - Header file template for CMSIS-RTOS implementation; and
(e) ./Device - Template files and implementations for Cortex-M class processors.

All of the above components are licensed to you under the terms of the BSD licence,
which is incorporated within or alongside the above components.

We are using many of these CMSIS software components in the open source, Apache licensed, mbed SDK: http://mbed.org/blog/entry/CMSIS-Components-BSD-Licensed/

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Electronic – Looking for a open-source ALU

Electronic – BSD style Open Source alternatives to CMSIS

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