24 lines
1.4 KiB
Text
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Text
The FOSSology project started out as an internal development effort at Hewlett
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Packard Company (HP). As part of HP's own internal IT governance process, we
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needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open
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source project was licensed. Rather than simply collecting a project's
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advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this
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tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and
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intelligently report all of the licenses being used, based on the license
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declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.
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Thus was born FOSSology - "The study of FOSS." As development progressed, we
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quickly realized that the analysis of open source licensing was only one
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application of what was quickly becoming a valuable general-purpose software
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data mining framework.
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HP understands the broad value of these tools for helping IT organizations to
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confidently adopt open source software, as well as to uncover what open source
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software is being used within their environments. Furthermore, we believe this
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tool will be helpful for open source developers and distributors to build a
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thorough licensing picture of the projects and packages they produce. Thus it
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is being provided to the broader FOSS community with the intent of building a
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vibrant, open community of users and contributors who will help make the
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framework and the agents as valuable as possible.
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WWW: http://fossology.org/
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