DSI's Development Process Differentiators

License Scanning

The significance of using unlicensed software during the development process should never be underestimated, but it occurs all too often. A 2009 report sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and conducted by IDC shows illegal use of software is still on the rise, and has cost the software industry $50 billion. The threat of litigation and reputational damage to both the software development partner and the application owners should not be ignored. DeCare Systems Ireland’s (DSI) takes its responsibility towards the inappropriate use of software most seriously.

DSI has a company-wide resource available to all development staff to educate and inform on the appropriate use of software licensing. This is a deliberate and determined effort to promote the use of fully licensed software at all times. This investment made in detailing software licenses on a project by project basis is seen as worthwhile effort to maintain the highest integrity in our solutions, to protect our clients, the software industry and DSI.

DSI have invested considerable time and resources in establishing our software build process. As part of this process, DSI has defined our own internal build repositories, each with their own purpose. These repositories are categorized as one of DSI-Approved, DSI-Unapproved, DSI-Plugins, DSI-Snapshots or DSILicense. The latter category is a vital repository whose responsibility it is to perform a confirmation that we are not using any licenses (OSS or proprietary) to which we do not have the appropriate permissions, or which would present problems in the development of commercial software. This repository holds license related files that specify permissions to use certain licenses, per project, per group of projects and for DSI overall. It also contains information about build actions that must be taken to remain in compliance with certain licenses (e.g. where it is necessary to including license notices in a software build).

Strict control is maintained over the license repositories, with access limited to those with the express authority to do so. DSI views the control of the software licenses as paramount in preserving the integrity of our delivered solution. We are confident that the significant resources dedicated to building up best practice in this area will, in the long term, give our clients and in turn those that they serve, maximum confidence in the long term viability in the solutions their businesses depend on.

An integral part of DSI’s Java build process is our use of Maven2 as the standard software build tool. DSI has added a Maven2 plugin that act as a control gateway to the artifacts that can be used for building applications. This plugin was added with the specific purpose of preventing any artifacts getting included in a software build without first getting its use of licenses checked. This covers both Open Source as well as commercial software.