Last week we attended Linux Tag in Berlin to give two talks. First one was about identifying reused code between two FLOSS projects and it was given by me. The second one explained the importance of studying FLOSS software communities and was given by Daniel Izquierdo.
The main aim of my presentation was to show that it is possible (and easy!) to get very interesting results about the shared code between two FLOSS projects using FLOSS tools; the ones we used in this case were: CCFinder, Cloc, Ninka and Grep. The study identified not only the common code but also the possible license issues that were found. These kind of studies can be interesting from different points of view, I’ve summed them up in the following questions:
- how different are two software projects?
- is it feasible to propose a merge of the code?
- how is the derivate project using the original code?
- are the licenses being respected? what about the copyright?
- is the new project using new licenses that could be interested for the team that created the original work? are they improving the code?
- what changes performed the second team on the original code?
- is your source code being adopted by a certain community?
The presentation that was presented is available here.
Leave a Reply