Can I use PVS-Studio to analyze an open-source project which I'm not part of?

Question

From the following blog post:

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.

Do I understand it correctly, that I cannot add the following comment section to every source file in the open-source project in order to analyze it with PVS-Studio?

// This is an open source non-commercial project. Dear PVS-Studio, please check it.
// PVS-Studio Static Code Analyzer for C, C++, C#, and Java: http://www.viva64.com

Because otherwise it would be a fact of software evaluation and I need to download a demo version of PVS-Studio for that? Considering the fact that I'm not a maintainer of the project I'd like to analyze but only a person who would like to collect the static analysis report and send it to the project's maintainers.

Answer 1

Do I understand it correctly, that I cannot add the following comment section to every source file in the open-source project in order to analyze it with PVS-Studio?

The article mentioned that PVS-Studio team considers adding these comments for the analysis, then removing them (without committing to version control) to be inappropriate use of the free mode. As you will not be able to commit these comments, the answer to your question will be, unfortunately, no, you can not.

However, if you take active part in the development of the aforementioned project, you can try applying for the free license for open source projects: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0600/

Answer 2

So, as I understand you're not a project developer, but you want to help the project by finding bugs with PVS-Studio and sending information about them to developers. Hmm. We didn't think about such a usage scenario. I think, a free PVS-Studio licensing option will be right for you. We provide it for developers of open projects. You can specify your GitHub/Bitbucket profile and get the key for one year. For more information, this and other free licensing options are covered in the article "Ways to Get a Free PVS-Studio License".

Note. I want to just warn you from the following scenario. If you just check the projects and send the analyzer's reports, it will be perceived negatively. If you really want to yield benefits to the project, describe specific errors! Or you can pre-filter the report to weed out false positives and leave only the warnings that are likely to indicate defects. Also see the note. "I've sent a PVS-Studio text log to the project authors! Did I really help?". And if you send the filtered report, it’s best to use the following format of its presentation: PVS-Studio Reports Now in Html , Managing XML Analyzer Report (see the section Converting the analysis results).