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http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/30/1221225&from=rss
GPL Violations On Windows Go Unnoticed?
Posted by kdawson on Thursday August 30, @09:29AM

from the not-in-my-back-yard dept.
Scott_F writes
"I recently reviewed several commercial, closed-source slideshow authoring
packages for Windows and came across an alarming trend. Several of the
packages I installed included GPL and LGPL software without any mention of
the GPL, much less source code. For example, DVD Photo Slideshow
(www.dvd-photo-slideshow.com) included mkisofs, cdrdao, dvdauthor, spumux,
id3lib, lame, mpeg2enc, and mplex (all of which are GPL or LGPL). The
company tried to hide this by wrapping them all in DLLs. There are other
violations in other packages as well. Based on my testing of other
software, it seems that use of GPL software in commercial Windows
applications is on the rise. My question is how much are GPL violations in
the Windows world being pursued? Does the FSF or EFF follow up on these if
the platform is not GPL? How aware is the community of this trend?"
This new method of detecting GPL violations could help here.


http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/25/1648253&tid=117

New Method To Detect and Prove GPL Violations
Posted by kdawson on Saturday August 25, @02:20PM
from the marked-at-birth dept.
qwerty writes
"A paper to be presented at the upcoming academic conference Automated
Software Engineering describes a new method to detect code theft and could
be used to detect GPL violations in particular. While the co-called
birthmarking method is demonstrated for Java, it is general enough to work
for other languages as well. The API Benchmark observes the interaction
between an application and (dynamic) libraries that are part of the runtime
system. This captures the observable behavior of the program and cannot be
easily foiled using code obfuscation techniques, as shown in the paper
(PDF). Once such a birthmark is captured, it can be searched for in other
programs. By capturing the birthmarks from popular open-source frameworks,
GPL-violating applications could be identified."
http://www.cse.msu.edu/ase2007/
http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/birthmarking/
http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/birthmarking/schuler-ase-2007.pdf



tq tq 8)

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