Crap4J - Alarming EULA

4 Responses to “Crap4J - Alarming EULA”

1. Alberto Savoia on November 2nd, 2007 2:32 pm

   Kirk,

   Thanks for catching that; but please rest assured that no code is transmitted anywhere when you use Crap4j. Once you download the plug-in, all the action with Crap4j is local. Soon we will give people an option to share their results (i.e. post their project’s front page) but it will be entirely voluntary and obvious: “Push this button to publish and share your summary on crap4j.org”.

   What happened is that we re-used some JUnit Factory components (e.g. the JUnit runner because we need the code coverage information) and inherited those EULAs. As you guessed, we did not review them carefully enough - our bad. We’ll fix it on the next release and thank you for bringing this to our attention.

   Alberto

   P.S. JUnit Factory, on the other hand, was intentionally designed to be used as a web-based, hosted, service.

   We created JUnit Factory primarily to make our software freely available to open-source and academic institutions for research, teaching programming/testing classes, and test generation.

   We have always provided free licenses of our full-fledged product to open-source and academia; but since many universities do not have the time or $ to buy and maintain a dedicated server (or enough servers to handle classes with many students) we thought it would be nice to help them by providing HW (a “grid” of 10 CPUs) as well as the software.

   Apparently it’s what people wanted. Since we started offering it, most of our intended users have chosen the Software as a Service model of JUnit Factory over a “regular” academic license.

   Thanks again for catching the oversight.

2. Bob Evans on November 2nd, 2007 3:58 pm

   Hi Kirk,

   We’re definitely not being deceiving, nor do we want anybody’s code. I would’ve appreciated the courtesy of contacting us and asking us if this is what we meant first. Especially considering how young the project is, and that it is trying to do some good in the community by raising awareness about testing and code quality. Hopefully your readers read the comments too.

   That request made, we are quite chagrined about the mistake. Here’s more clarification on how we use the JunitFactory components in crap4j and what we intend to do to fix this problem.

   We are re-using the JunitFactory test-runner components (with permission) to generate the coverage data used by the Crap4j component, which is licensed under The Eclipse Public License. The Junitfactory components that we install just run the tests and produce coverage results, since we don’t use, nor install, the JunitFactory client component which is used to upload code. Our intention has always been to make the coverage runner pluggable so that others can be used. It just turns out that the Agitar coverage tool provides basis-path coverage, which is more comprehensive than some other free coverage tools out there.

   As Alberto said, we’ll figure out what to do about that license to make the intent more clear. I tried to separate the Eclipse plugin bundles to make it clear that they are two separate components, but obviously we need to do more.

   Good catch on the Ant Task not having a license in the distribution, that was just a mistake that will be fixed in the next release (maybe today.)

   Thanks,
   Bob Evans

3. Bob Evans on November 2nd, 2007 8:08 pm

   The ant distribution and the eclipse plugin have been updated to include all the licenses for crap4j and the components that it relies upon.

   There is still the issue of what it means that we use a 3rd party component (JunitFactory) that mentions that code might be uploaded, but at least the crap4j license, which has no such clause, is clear and available in a licenses folder in both distributions.

4. Jason on May 21st, 2009 4:14 am

   its now 2009 and the Agitar components still carry the clause
   ” EXPERIMENTAL PRODUCT WHICH TRANSMITS CODE WITHOUT SECURITY TO
   AGITAR’S SERVERS.”

   so I guess they really do.

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