Commercial product with the same functiality as my research project I’m writing my master’s thesis about visual automated testing, which will be summarized to paper.

In my theoretical study, I reference other people’s work, papers and study about this topic. Meanwhile, there are some new commercial products that have the same functionality as my research project and they provide a 30-day free trail.

Now my questions are:


Should I reference those commercial products too in my theoretical study or should I just ignore them?
If I reference them, do I have to add a comparison of results between those products and my implementation in my practical study?
There are no publications on the commercial product I found. So could I publish a paper on my work and if yes, should I ignore those methods?
You can totally reference non-free software in your work. The licence under which it is released has no impact on the technical and scientific merit of its algorithms and features. The only issue is that it is harder to know exactly what the system does if the code is not open, and that it will be harder (and probably more expensive) to reproduce any research based on it.

There are a lot of papers out there (often coming from private-sector reserachers rather than from academics, but still) which are exclusively focused on industrial products under proprietary licence. What is important is what is said about them, to which extent they are analysed, whether they are properly compared to other existing systems... Of course, it is easier to do that if you have inside knowledge of the product (i.e. you have participated to its design for instance), but it will remain difficult (not impossible) for the community to validate or refute your claims.

In a state of the art, if you know that a non-free system has a relevant feature, or solves a related problem, or contribute to the field, you just cannot ignore it, it would be a deep mistake, scientifically speaking (*). However, it might be useful to take precautions about the verifiability of the system's claim.

For what it's worth, the software development attached to my PhD thesis relied on a proprietary framework. It's not ideal in my opinion, but it doesn't invalidate the corresponding research, as long as the choice is duly motivated (for instance, no other framework provides feature X).

(*) "Listen to me: someone who doesn’t know the truth is just thick-headed. But someone who does know it and calls it a lie is a crook." (Berthold Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 9 - you want to be a researcher? This play is a must read).