[tsimionescu]

While the cost to programmers' sanity of running things like BD is immeasurable in my estimation, if you are already doing it, doing it for Copilot code shouldn't add any extra cost, unless Copilot is actually constantly spewing copyrighted code.

[int_19h]

> While the cost to programmers' sanity of running things like BD is immeasurable in my estimation

Can you clarify? In my experience, source scan is just another job in one's build pipeline. And I've only seen it fail when it does, in fact, detect a new component (or a license change in the existing component) - because at that point you have to do the legal dance for third-party notices etc. But the latter part something you have to do either way, tools or no tools.

[tsimionescu]

Source scan is indeed not a problem. Scanning all the binary blobs is where things go wrong, on two aspects.

For 1, there are quite a few false positives, especially if you use commercial 3rd parties as well. For example, I had a UI component recognized as some obscure academic micro kernel!? Investigating, we found that happened because that micro kernel project was using the same commercial UI component somewhere (probably under some academic license), and there repo was just where BD had seen this JS code before.

For a second, and much more common and annoying one, at least in BD in my company, you have to add explanations to each individual identified 3rd party package that uses something like GPL to affirm that it is being used in a way that complies with a license. If you're doing something like distributing a Linux VM, that means hundreds of packages that are part of the distribution. This work has to be done manually, which means entering the same copy/paste text in hundreds of places in the atrociosly slow BD UI.