The FOSSology Project: 10 Years Of License Scanning

Michael C Jaeger, Oliver Fendt, Robert Gobeille, Maximilian Huber, Johannes Najjar, Kate Stewart, Steffen Weber, Andreas Würl

Abstract


FOSSology is an open source license compliance software system and toolkit. As a toolkit you can run license, copyright and export control scans from the command line. As a system, a database and web UI are provided to provide a compliance workflow.

The FOSSology project published a first software version in December 2007. Given this anniversary after ten years of license scanning, the article presents a look at the project: the motivation for building and using FOSSology, the history of the project and its status as of today. Because SPDX represents the de-facto standard for exchanging license and copyright information about software packages, an introduction about FOSSology’s support for exporting and importing SPDX documents is presented.


Keywords


Free and Open Source Software, License Scanning, Compliance Tools, SPDX, OSS Analysis

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