The FOSSology Project: 10 Years Of License Scanning

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.