Comment by marc_abonce
1 month ago
> The TH3 test harness is a set of proprietary tests [...]
> The dbsqlfuzz engine is a proprietary fuzz tester.
It's interesting that an open-source (actually public domain) software uses some proprietary tests. It never occurred to me that this was a possibility, though in retrospective it's obviously possible as long as the tests are not part of the release.
Could this be an alternative business model for "almost-open-source" projects? Similar to open-core, but in this case the project would easy to copy (open features), hard to modify (closed tests).
Many times these test suites are more valuable than code itself, particularly in legacy software. Trying to find and document thousands of edge cases a software like Excel must have is more difficult than implementing them.
> It never occurred to me that this was a possibility
Yes, it's viable. I do it for my companies projects in addition to dual-licensing under the GPL. See "The unit tests and Unicode data generators are not public. Access to them is granted exclusively to commercial licensees." [1].
[1] https://github.com/railgunlabs/unicorn?tab=readme-ov-file#li...