The FOSSology Project: 10 Years Of License Scanning

Authors

  • Michael C Jaeger Siemens AG, 80200 Muenchen, Germany
  • Oliver Fendt Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, 80200 Munich, Germany
  • Robert Gobeille P.O. Box 298276, Wasilla, AK 99629-8267 U.S.A.
  • Maximilian Huber TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring
  • Johannes Najjar TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring
  • Kate Stewart The Linux Foundation, 1 Letterman Drive, Building D, Suite D4700, San Francisco, CA 94129, U.S.A.
  • Steffen Weber TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring
  • Andreas Würl TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring

Keywords:

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

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.

Author Biographies

  • Michael C Jaeger, Siemens AG, 80200 Muenchen, Germany
    Michael is part of maintaier groups for the OSS projects Fossology and SW360 (on Github), both in the area of OSS handling for license compliance and component management. At Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich / Germany, Michael worked in several roles as project lead, software architect, trainer and consultant for distributed systems, server applications and their development with open source software.
  • Oliver Fendt, Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, 80200 Munich, Germany

    Oliver Fendt has more than 16 years experience in open source software, its license conditions and how to comply to the different licenses. During this time he kicked off several initiatives, among these initiatives are the open source project SW360 and the sponsoring of considerable contributions to the open source project FOSSology. He has developed different trainings about open source software and how to achieve license compliance and is OSS compliance trainings since 2008.

  • Robert Gobeille, P.O. Box 298276, Wasilla, AK 99629-8267 U.S.A.

    Robert Gobeille is the creator of FOSSology and the original project leader. He works currently in projects with nexB.

  • Maximilian Huber, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring

    Maximilian Huber is a consultant at TNG Technology Consulting Max spends most of the time to develop and support the Linux Foundation project FOSSology and the Eclipse incubator SW360.

  • Johannes Najjar, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring

    Johannes Najjar is a Senior Consultant at TNG Technology Consulting GmbH. He has a background in high energy physics and currently focusses on IOT and Cloud Computing.

  • Kate Stewart, The Linux Foundation, 1 Letterman Drive, Building D, Suite D4700, San Francisco, CA 94129, U.S.A.

    Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation responsible for a portfolio of open source projects and standards. With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia and the US. For the last 20 years she has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India and China, and focused on delivery of open source based products from Freescale, Canonical & Linaro.

  • Steffen Weber, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring

    Steffen Weber is a software developer with background in algebra and numerics. High ranking in algorithmic competitions favors the focus switch to IT after the PhD in mathematics. Since 2013 he worked as full time developer for projects in certain languages with different frameworks.

  • Andreas Würl, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Betastr. 13a, 85774 Unterfoehring

    Andreas Wuehrl is working for more than seven years as an IT consultant at TNG. His main focus is participating in and improving the agile software development process mainly with sustainable design and architecture. He practises a variety of programming and configuration languages and enjoys contributing to open source software in his free time.

Downloads

Published

2018-03-29

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Tech Watch

License

The most restrictive licence we will accept for submission is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) SPDX identifier CC-BY-4.0

How to Cite

The FOSSology Project: 10 Years Of License Scanning. (2018). Journal of Open Law, Technology & Society, 9(1), 9-18. https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/123