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Bradley M. Kuhn 2014-03-20 21:26:56 -04:00
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compliance-guide.tex
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@ -211,20 +211,26 @@ software, they should gently facilitate all decisions to bring Free Software int
product.
Simple, engineering-oriented rules help provide a stable foundation for
free software integration. Ask your software developers to send an email to a
Free Software integration. For example, simply ask your software developers to send an email to a
standard place describing each new Free Software component they add to the system,
and have them include a brief description of how they will incorporate it
into the product. Make sure they use a revision control system, and have
into the product. Further, make sure developers use a revision control
system (such as Git or Mercurial), and have
store the upstream versions of all software in a ``vendor branch'' or
similar mechanism, whereby they can easily track and find the main version
of the software and local changes made.
of the software and, separately, any local changes.
Such procedures are best instituted at your project's launch. Once a
chaotic and poorly-sourced development process has begun, the challenges
of determining and cataloging the presence of GPL'd components is
difficult. If you are in that situation, we recommend the
Such procedures are best instituted at your project's launch. Once
chaotic and poorly-sourced development processes begin, cataloging the
presence of GPL'd components becomes challenging.
Such a situation often requires use of a tool to ``catch up'' your knowledge
about what software your product includes. Most commonly, companies choose
some software licensing scanning tool to inspect the codebase. However,
there are few tools that are themselves Free Software. Thus, GPL enforcers
usually recommend the GPL'd
\href{http://fossology.org/}{Fossology system}, which analyzes a
source-code base and produces a list of Free Software licenses that may apply to
source code base and produces a list of Free Software licenses that may apply to
the code. Fossology can help you build a catalog of the sources you have
already used to build your product. You can then expand that into a more
structured inventory and process.