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

4 points by limonkufu 8y ago

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

tobylane 8y ago
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).
- blcArmadillo 8y ago
  Is it maybe the strings utility: https://linux.die.net/man/1/strings https://linux.die.net/man/1/strings?
  - rl1987 8y ago
    There's also nm(1) and objdump(1).
    - istumbler 8y ago
      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`
jrpt 8y ago
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?