Our mission is to build free software tools to facilitate the study and analysis of Free and Open Source Software. Today we are best known for finding software licenses in text.

Installing the FOSSology software:

• creates an empty software filesystem repository
• creates a database (PostgreSQL) for metadata storage and retrieval
• provides web and command line interfaces to populate the software repository
• provides web interface for viewing reports
• provides a batch subsystem for running lengthy analyses and reports
• provides engines (run from the web or cli) for:
  • License analysis (analyzes EVERY file for license information)
  • RPM spec file parsing
  • metadata extraction from libextractor (jpg headers, pdf, doc, …)
  • file type
  • executing ad hoc sql
  • executing ad hoc scripts

New in version 1.0.0:

• Massive improvements to web-based user interface responsiveness, 50x or better speed-up, with retrieval and display of license reports in just seconds, for even the biggest reports.
• Huge improvements in license analysis speed, as much as 10 times faster, with analysis of full linux distribution DVD images in 24-48 hours (depending on system performance, CPU, memory, etc)
• License detection accuracy improvements - the library of licenses and terms that we search for and report has been carefully tuned based on lots and lots of real-world testing
• Completely redesigned build and release system, makes building and installing FOSSology from source code much easier, and also enables creation of FOSSology packages for common Linux distributions
• Software packaging of FOSSology for the Debian Linux distribution - For the first time, the FOSSology project has a complete set of packages to enable simple apt-based installation of FOSSology on most DEB-based Linux systems.
• (beta) Software packaging of FOSSology for the Fedora distribution, using native RPM packages. These RPM packages should provide streamlined installation on most RPM-based systems (Redhat, SuSE, etc)
• Automated test suite to provide web-UI testing and validation by the FOSSology project and any other downstream users
• Self-test agent that allows FOSSology to inspect itself and report on common configuration problems that could impact FOSSology operation

View the complete release notes for FOSSology 1.0.0 for more details: release notes

Celebrating 1 year of FOSSology!

New in version 0.9.0:

• New “license term” capability added. This features allows the user to

1. create a predefined default set of common license terms/phrases and associate them with specific licenses
2. create new “groups” (aka canonical name) of license terms/phrases to fine tune fossology to identify particular terms within a scanned section and (optionally) associate it with one or more licenses.

This new feature can be accessed via the UI through Organize → License → Manage Groups and via Organize → License → Manage Terms

• Added new agent “licinspect” to inspect license sections for terms that might change the license identification.
• Created agent-license-once-compare.php for selectively choosing the license to compare against. This feature is useful to see why fossology chose one license over another. This feature is available as the “Recompare” micro-menu in the View License window.
• Added columns to the uploadtree table in the fossology db to eliminate expensive queries using join and improve overall db performance.
• delagent: huge speed improvement (went from iterating to just doing one delete.)
• Many new license templates added.
• Many Bug fixes. Including, the “comma comma” problem, where a copyright statement containing a bunch of years separated by commas end up matching all other licenses that contain a series of commas.