How to use PVS-Studio for free

We want to help the software world improve the quality of their code, and get to know static analysis tools better. We are giving the opportunity to use PVS-Studio static code analyzer for free, for educational purposes, so that individual developers and enthusiastic teams could also fully use it.

How to use PVS-Studio for free

by Andrey Karpov

From the article:

Some developers may say that they don't want to see two additional lines of code at the beginning of the file with the comments not related to the project itself. It is their right, and they may simply not use the tool. Or they can purchase a commercial license, and use it without any restrictions. We see these comments as a gratuity for the provided license, and also as an additional way to promote our product. I think it's a good, fair exchange.

Add a Comment

Comments are closed.

Comments (3)

0 0

iterator said on Nov 30, 2016 09:35 AM:

Requiring a comment stating the nature of your product seems like a good solution, but--

Have you considered the possibility that someone would make a build system which simply prepends the comment to every source file? How do you feel about that? It would seem fairly easy to do, and I think would violate your intent.
0 0

Andrey Karpov said on Nov 30, 2016 09:57 AM:

We do not worry about it. It is not our potential customer.
0 0

Andrey Karpov said on Dec 5, 2016 12:30 PM:

There was a large discussion on the topic whether it is permitted to add and remove comments in the source code so that to use the analyzer for free. We consider this method to be unacceptable, as it is a way to bypass the restrictions, imposed on a free license. Therefore, we decided to add the following section to the license agreement:

You have the right to use PVS-Studio for free by adding special comments to the source code of your project. To find out which comments should be added and the way to automate this process, read the article: "How to use PVS-Studio for Free".

Note that this mode is not intended to evaluate this software. Please use a demo version or request a temporary license key to try out the analyzer.

You should insert these comments when you have already decided to use the analyzer on a regular basis. You can remove these comments later, but it is possible to remove them only once.

It is not allowed to add and remove the comments in the source code repeatedly. It is also not allowed to append comments multiple times and subsequently roll back the content of comments in source files to initial state using version control system. Such actions are intended to evade the terms that the source code should contain comments and are a violation of the analyzer usage agreement.