Remixware is the studio’s thirty-fifth project. It looks for code in a project that came from open source and says what the licence that came with it asks, for a GPL function pasted into an MIT product as much as for a snippet an AI assistant reproduced from a library it learned from. The launch post walks through one finding.
0.1.0 compares a project with an index of the code it depends on or might have copied from, such as node_modules, a vendor folder, the Go module cache or a cloned repository. It finds copies that were reformatted, renamed, cut down or given new comments. Each finding gets a status: conflict, no licence, review, attribution missing or attributed. remixware check fails a CI build on what the policy names. remixware notice writes the missing third-party notices. SCANOSS results can be read in for a check against far more public code. Three sample reports cover an online shop, a clean project and a GPL-2.0 firmware tree that Apache code can’t go into.
The testing planted 2,880 copies of functions from 14 real open source projects in a test project, changed six ways. In the recorded run Remixware traced 98% of the copies of 100 tokens or more to the right function and none to the wrong project. In 99,198 lines of projects that weren’t indexed, the only matches were typer’s real copies of click.
Before release, independent reviewers went looking for ways to make it wrong, three times. The first review found 16 problems: among them, a file header could make GPL code pass as MIT, EUPL was read as GPL, and a made-up index could pull local files into a report. The next two checked the fixes and found 23 more, several in the fixes themselves. All were fixed, each with a test, before the numbers were recorded. A review of the website after launch found one more, a line of the MPL text read as a copyright line, and 0.1.1 fixed it the same day. Like RMQA, it’s a check meant to run in CI before anything ships.
Open source under Apache 2.0, with releases for Linux, macOS and Windows.