We need to revisit Software Component and possibly Software Instance

[adammontville]

I'm not really happy with our definition for Software Component. To me, a software component may be part of a specific package, not an installed package. For example, the Atom text editor may have a "file viewer" component. This definition is more like the intent behind SACM Component. Does this really mean to say "software application"? That may solve a lot.

If we update this to say software application, then we'll need to additionally update Software Instance to be defined as "a running instance of a software application."

[henkbirkholz]

There is a reason why "Software Component" is "installed software" (it is not always installed package, firstly because it can be only a subset of the package and 2ndly because we are not sure if package includes every common source today John had some insight on this, if I remember correctly.):

Software Component and Hardware Component are currently on the same semantic level. Both are "installed but not necessarily in use". This creates the object property relationship that every endpoint "is-a" composite of zero or more Hardware Components & and zero or more Software Components. As Endpoint is the taxonomic parent of Target Endpoint and SACM Component this is of course also true for those.

[adammontville]

I'm not sure what to do with respect to this particular issue, but would like to recognize that the present definition for software component uses software package, for which we may end up using the ISO 19770 definition. It turns out that ISO 19770 also defines software component:

entity with discrete structure, such as an assembly or software module, within a system considered at a particular level of analysis.

And provides the following note:

Note 1 to entry: In this part of ISO/IEC 19770, software component refers to a part of a whole, such as a component of a software product, a component of a software identification tag, etc.

I don't know that the ISO definition is helpful.