What is CopyTracker?
Copytracker is a software designed to find plagiarism in text documents.
This software aims to be used by as many people as possible, but especially academic and press world.
CopyTracker started as a student project at the French "Ecole Centrale de Lille". It is an open source software, meaning that anyone has the right to modify the source code in orfer to improve the product. The programmers hope to create a software at least as efficient as the others (who aren't free...) in order to give universities a very efficient way to detect fraud. The two main goals of this software are to make the correction's work easier and to alert students about plagiarism, which is more and more growing, mainly because of the outstanding development of the internet.
Functions
Here are some functions of Copytracker:
- CopyTracker can compare a file to one or several other files
- CopyTracker is able to search texts on personnal databases and on the Internet
- It accepts MS Word files (.doc), pdf and HTML files
- It provides you a percentage of plagiarism, which is very convenient to interpret a result quickly
- Its interface is available in English or French
- CopyTracker uses MS Word in order to compare the MS Word files.
A free Software
Out software is under the General Public License, a very famous Open Source license.
In order to be considered as open source, a licence has to respect several criteria, which are listed by the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org). The main charateristics to be open source are listed below:
- free use of the software
- free redistribution of the software
- Possibility for those who want to modify the source code in order to improve the software. But the results of those works also have to be open-source.
- This condition implies to have the source code accessible for everyone.
A software can not be regarded as open-source if it do not respect those conditions. It is important to dissociate a free software from a open software. As a matter of fact, many free software are not open, because one can not see the source code for example. But there are also several open software which are not free. Companies based on an free software often earn money by offering many services linked to their software.
Examples of famous open-source software : the explorating system GNU/Linux, web server Apache, OpenOffice, web navigator Mozilla firefox, video reader VideoLan (project of the Ecole Centrale paris)...