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Weekend Project: Get to Know Your Source Code with FOSSology (Linux.com)

[Posted November 5, 2010 by ris]

Nathan Willis digs into source code with FOSSology. "FOSSology was originally built as an internal tool at HP, to help engineers follow the large company's IT governance policies when working with open source software written elsewhere. Even if your company or project isn't as big as HP, any time you blend code from different authors or want to borrow a routine from another open source project, it can get tricky to maintain all the rules. Certain licenses are compatible to combine in one executable, while others need to be separate processes. If you customize an open source application for internal use, you may also need to keep track of authorship - even more so if you send patches upstream."

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Posted Nov 6, 2010 16:11 UTC (Sat) by Kwi (subscriber, #59584) [Link]

Sounds nice. I myself spent an afternoon at work looking through licenses for a project, netting 19 full pages of copyright notices and license texts (nearly all of which are required to be included in the product documentation). Any tool to automate this would certainly be welcome, and FOSSology looks interesting.

Its dependencies are horrendous, though, and I'm not talking about the libraries and external utilities (which are just a short apt-get away): I need to install and configure an Apache webserver and a Postgresql server, and then I need to create a user in the web UI before I can upload the source code to the webserver?

How about a command-line version to run locally? :-)

Weekend Project: Get to Know Your Source Code with FOSSology (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 7, 2010 4:25 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Probably you want the fossology-web-single package:

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fossology-web-...

Weekend Project: Get to Know Your Source Code with FOSSology (Linux.com)

Posted Nov 7, 2010 19:59 UTC (Sun) by JoelSherrill (guest, #43881) [Link]

I am curious how this compares to the Open Source License Checker (http://sourceforge.net/projects/oslc/).