Finding Software License Violations Through Binary Code Clone Detection - A Retrospective

Ten years ago, we published the article Finding software license violations through binary code clone detection at the MSR 2011 conference. Our paper was motivated by the tendency of em- bedded hardware vendors to only release binary blobs of their rmware, often violating the licensing terms of open-source soft- ware present inside those blobs. The techniques presented in our paper were designed to accurately identify open-source code hid- den inside binary blobs. Here, we give our perspectives on the impact of our work, both industrially and academically, and re- visit the original problem statement to see what has happened in the eld of open-source compliance in the intervening decade.