Discussion on a free PVS-Studio license for projects posted on GitHub
I offer for your attention the article prototype titled “Free PVS-Studio for everyone who develops open source projects on GitHub”. I’d like you to approach this topic in a meaningful manner, express constructive criticism and positive suggestions. We’d like to have opinions to what extent the option we suggested is reasonable and convenient. What can be improved? What additional limitations can be added? Which one of you would use/not use it and why?
I stress once again that the article is trial and is aimed at generating a discussion. If you stumbled onto this post 2019, please, go to the new version of the article.
We help to make code of open source software better and more reliable. Even though due to our publications more than 10000 errors have been fixed in open source projects, it is obviously not enough. Our team is physically not able to regularly check thousands of open source projects. That’s why in 2016 we offered a free version of PVS-Studio licensing. The only condition is having a special kind of comments in your code. The article “How to use PVS-Studio for Free” tells in more detail about this type of licensing.
In response to GitHub community wishes, we decided to make PVS-Studio usage possible for those who takes part in development of open source projects, posted on GitHub.
Everyone who wishes, can get a free license for 2 years. To get the license, you need to:
1. Go to the page: __todo__;
2. Enter the link to your GitHub profile;
3. Enter the e-mail, where you will be sent a license key;
4. Send a request for a free license.
Upon expiration of the license, you can get a new license key in the same way.
The key is individual and can only be used to check open source projects published on GitHub. Free license doesn’t extend to projects’ mirrors.
The old version of free analyzer usage with adding code comments remains in force. This mode has its own advantages. For example, students can use it to test their projects without having to upload them on GitHub. Moreover, the previous version allows you to use the analyzer even for closed projects.
Conditions
Support for free users is carried out in replies on StackOverflow. The article “How to use PVS-Studio for Free” (see the section “Update: Support”) describes this condition in more detail. We’d like to note that StackOverflow isn’t s bug-tracker. Let’s discuss there questions, related to analyzer work and so on. To inform us of obvious bugs, as usually, please, write to our support.
The action of providing free licenses is timeless. However, if we feel that something has gone wrong, we reserve the right to change its terms or to stop it. We also reserve the right to withdraw a particular key without explanation.
As mentioned earlier, the ability to use free license does not apply to projects mirrors, such as Clang, Chromium, KDE and so on. Support of developers of such projects would require significant work from our team. So it would be quite fair if the company where these developers work got a paid license :).
