Version 1 2019-02-15
- Fossology
- ScanCode toolkit
- AboutCode toolkit
- Deltacode
- AboutCode Manager
- TraceCode toolkit
- OSS Discovery by OpenLogic
- Licensee.js
- Ninka
- Eclipse SW360
- OSS Review Toolkit ORT
- license-compatibility-checker
- The Quartermaster Project QMSTR
- Open Source License Checklists by OSADL
- Apache Rat
- Apache Tentacles
- Apache Whisker
- Cregit
- OSS Attribution Builder
- OSSPolice
- CLIPol
- Tern
- SPDX Tools
- SPDX Maven Plugin
Development Tooling and Technologies
- Request and Incident Management
- Integrated Development Environments
- Source Code Management and SCM Services
- Continuous Integration and Deployment
- Build Tools, Frameworks and Dependency Management
- Package Indexes and Repositories
- Document Management
- Testing Frameworks
- Container Technologies
Open source software has eaten the world, but organizations are still struggling with effective compliance. Open source software is heterogenous and re-used, which, while positive for software development, creates a challenge for compliance. Compliance requires multiple tools and these should be ideally combined into a workflow that supports a number of business and developer requirements. One of the requirements is ease of use in a modern development environment where code development cycles are getting ever shorter and new development results are pushed to operations ever faster. For this to work, open source compliance tools likely need to integrate with development tooling.
In the following report some of these tools are listed with information of their main license, website and a summary of their features, based on accounts by the projects. The report has been crafted to map out the wide range of open source tools that one might use to help keep their open source software compliant. However, this report, ever so comprehensive, is not exhaustive. The report includes FOSS tools as well as a few commercial tools. It also has a section for Open Source Initiatives and Development Environments, as these are also important on a way towards automated open compliance with open tooling and open data.
This report will be complemented based on an ecosystem survey and on practical testing of the most popular open source tools.
This report is part of the first work package in the Double Open project. See doubleopen.org for more details.
ClearlyDefined on GitHub
ClearlyDefined is a community / contributor powered project in which the goals are:
- Raise awareness about lack of clarity around licenses and security vulnerabilities within FOSS project teams
- Automatically harvest data from projects
- Make it easy for anyone to contribute missing information
- Crowd-source the curation of these contributions
- Feed curated contributions back to the original projects
ClearlyDefined provides a mechanism for harvesting available data using tools such as ScanCode and FOSSology, and facilitates crowd-sourcing the curation of that information when ambiguities or gaps arise. The ultimate goal of harvesting and curation is to contribute any new-found clarity (e.g., new licenses found) to the upstream projects so they can include the updates in their next release. The project focuses now on clarifying individual project's license, source code location and copyright holders, but do see security, accessibility, and internationalization being important parts of the ClearlyDefined ecosystem.
The mission of the Oscano project is to solve the problem of scaling SCA to modern needs with Open Source approach. The Eclipse Oscano project provides a complete software composition analysis solution, focused on compliance and security, that can be installed on cloud, local server, or workstation environment. To achieve this, existing OSS components will be reviewed by the project team for possible integration into the Oscano stack and capabilities not existing will be built and integrated. Main use cases of Oscano include Open Source license compliance management, open source inventory management, vulnerability remediation automation and software analysis reporting.
The solution is designed to meet the challenge of massively increasing scale and continuous nature of build and releasing of modern software systems. It addresses the scaling problem through four principal means:
- Continuous and fully automated operation cycle from new code commit to analysis, scan and action
- Maximum engagement of developers in the software analysis and management use cases for direct and early troubleshooting
- Risk-based smart analysis of compliance and vulnerability issues
- Maximum re-use of pre-scanned open source software data.
ACT is a Linux Foundation project. The goal is to consolidate investment in, and increase interoperability and usability of, open source compliance tooling, which helps organizations manage compliance obligations. ACT also welcomes two new projects to be hosted at The Linux Foundation as part of the initiative, in addition to two existing Linux Foundation projects that will become part of the new project. The new projects are complementary to existing Linux Foundation compliance projects such as OpenChain, which identifies key recommended processes to make open source license compliance simpler and more consistent, and the Open Compliance Program, which educates and helps developers and companies understand their license requirements and how to build efficient, frictionless and often automated processes to support compliance.
The four projects that will be part of ACT are:
- FOSSology
- QMSTR
- SPDX Tools
- Tern
OpenChain is a project hosted by the Linux Foundation. It answers a question: "How do I trust my open source supply chain"? It provides a framework for shared, compliant use of FOSS. Conforming companies create an environment that supports use of FOSS internally and sharing of FOSS with partners. The OpenChain Specification defines a core set of requirements every quality compliance program must satisfy. OpenChain Conformance allows organizations to display their adherence to these requirements. The OpenChain Curriculum supports this process by providing extensive reference material for effective open source training and management. The result is that open source license compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for all participants in the software supply chain.
This is GitHub repository hosted by Siemens. Sharing creates value strives for the goal to lower the required effort in license compliance work for all who want to make use of OSS in a license compliant way. To achieve this Sharing creates value will develop, share and improve the artifacts needed to fulfill the requirements of the different Free and Open Source Software licenses by applying the Open Source Software development principles.
Another objective of Sharing creates value is a very close collaboration with the OSS community in order to fix detected "bugs" in licensing as well as introducing the information needed for license compliance activities in the Open Source projects, i.e. provide our analysis work to the OSS projects.
Last but not least Sharing creates value support tools which will help automate and reduce effort in component management, license identification and OSS license compliance activities.
Sharing creates value wants to be the platform, which provides all information and artifacts for OSS license compliance.
Fossology is a scanning tool for license, copyright and export control scans. In one click you can generate an SPDX file, or a ReadMe with all the copyrights notices from your software. It provides a Web UI and a database for a compliance workflow. To scan, a package must be uploaded to the server. Scanners provided are Monk, Nomos and Ninka. It has version control on packages scanned, so when scanning a newer version of a previous package, only changed files are rescanned.
ScanCode is a suite of command line utilities to reliably scan a codebase for license, copyright, package manifests and direct dependencies and other interesting origin and licensing information discovered in source and binary code files. ScanCode provides comprehensive scan results that you can save as JSON, HTML, CSV or SPDX. As a command line application returning JSON, ScanCode is easy to integrate in a code analysis pipeline and CI/CD.
The AboutCode Toolkit and ABOUT files provide a simple way to document the origin, license, usage and other important or interesting information about third-party software components that you use in your project. In addition, this tool is able to generate attribution notices and identify redistributable source code used in your project.
DeltaCode allows you to easily compare ScanCode scans for two versions of a package, component, codebase or product in order to quickly identify possible changes with a focus on identifying license changes. DeltaCode reports matching files with a score and a list of factors that contribute to that score.
You can use DeltaCode with ScanCode to identify and track license and related changes in open source or third party software packages or components from release to release.
AboutCode Manager provides an advanced visual UI to help you quickly evaluate license and other notices identified by ScanCode and record your conclusion about the effective license(s) for a component.
AboutCode Manager is based on Electron and is the primary desktop/GUI tool for using nexB’s AboutCode tools.
TraceCode Toolkit helps you determine which components are actually distributed or deployed for your product. This is essential information for determining your open source license obligations because many are only triggered by distribution or deployment.
TraceCode Toolkit is a tool to analyze the traced execution of a build, so you can learn which files are built into binaries and ultimately deployed in your distributed software.
OSS Discovery finds the open source software embedded in applications and installed on computers. It is a scanning tool, which gives human readable and machine readable results.
Licensee.js is a command line utility to check npm package dependency license metadata against rules. It uses SPDX license expression and whitelisted data to capture packages that are under different license than whitelisted.
Ninka is a lightweight license identification tool for source code. It is sentence-based, and provides a simple way to identify open source licenses in a source code file. It is capable of identifying several dozen different licenses (and their variations).
A software catalogue application designed to provide a central place for sharing information about software components used by an organization. It is designed to neatly integrate into existing infrastructures related to the management of software artifacts and projects by providing separate backend services for distinct tasks and a set of portlets to access these services. It has connectors to interact with external systems such as code scan tools. Thus far the project has not provided download information.
Verifies free and open source software license compliance by checking source code and dependencies. It works by analyzing the source code for dependencies, downloading the source code of the dependencies, scanning all source code for license information, and summarizing the results. The different tools that make up ORT are designed as libraries (for programmatic use) with a minimal command line interface (for scripted use). Currently the report formats are Excel sheet, NOTICE file, static HTML and Web App.
Check npm dependencies' package.json for license compatibility based on SPDX standards. Claimed to be a work in progress, but gives a simple comparison of the licenses in the package with an explanation to how permissive the license is (Permissive > Weakly Protective > Strongly Protective > Network Protective). Shows potential incompatibilities with a colorful scheme.
Quartermaster is a suite of command line tools and build system extensions that instruments software builds to create FOSS compliance documentation and support compliance decisions. Quartermaster runs adjacent to a software build process. A master process collects information about the software that is build. Once the build is complete, the master executes a number of analysis tools, and finally a number of reporters. All modules are executed in the context of the master, not the build machine. The master ships all dependencies of the modules without affecting the build clients file system (it runs in a container).
Open Source License Checklists
Unidentified
A project to create and disseminate generally accepted rules to fulfill the obligations when distributing software that is licensed under commonly used Open Source licenses. The goal of this project is to create checklists for the most frequently used and the most important Open Source licenses and to provide assistance tools for the determination of differences between them.
http://creadur.apache.org/rat/
Apache Rat is a release audit tool, focused on licenses. Coded in Java, it runs from the command line with plugins for Maven and Ant. Rat is extensible. It is part of the Apache Creadur project.
Apache Tentacles helps the reviewer by automating interactions with the repository containing the artifacts comprising the release. Apache Tentacles simplifies the job of reviewing repository releases consisting of large numbers of artifacts. Coded in Java, it runs from the command line.
Apache Whisker assists assembled applications maintain correct legal documentation.
Whisker can
- verify - checking meta-data quality against a distribution
- generate - legal documents from meta-data
Particular useful for complex assembled applications.
Cregit identifies the contributors of source code. The cregit version of a source file has two interactive features:
- Mouse-over: you will get a summary of the information of the commit that added this token. This information is:
- Its commit id
- Its git-author (the value of the Author field of the commit)
- Its git-author-date (the value of the field Author Date of the commit)
- Summary log of the commit
- Left-click on a token will open a new window with the details of the commit (in github). You can keep this window open and it will keep reloading the files.
OSS Attribution Builder is a website that helps teams create attribution documents for software products.
OSSPolice is a risk assessment service for developers that can quickly identify potential free software license violations and known n-day security vulnerabilities in their apps.
CLIPol is a web platform, maintained by the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, a public interest technology law clinic at the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, University of Ottawa, designed to serve useful information about open data licences, open content licences, and open source software. It consists of:
- a database of machine-readable information on the rights, restrictions and obligations in different licences;
- an API for retrieving this information;
- a web-accessible site for viewing this information in a user-friendly way (avoiding legalese); and
- a set of web apps built on top of this information (currently consisting of a compatibility-checking tool and a text-comparison tool).
Tern is a software package inspection tool for containers written in Python. Tern is an inspection tool to find the metadata of the packages installed in a container image. It does this in two steps:
- It uses overlayfs to mount the first filesystem layer in a container image
- It then executes scripts from the "command library" in a chroot environment to collect information about packages installed in that layer
- With that information as a base, it continues to iterate over step 1 and 2 for the rest of the layers in the container image
- Once done, it generates a report in different formats. The default report is a verbose explanation of what layers brought in what software components. If a Dockerfile is provided then it will also provide what lines in the Dockerfile was used to create the layers.
The consolidated SPDX workgroup tool provides translation, comparison, and verification functionality in a single download. The tool is a Java command line utility.
The following functions are available:
- TagToSpreadsheet - Convert a tag format input file to a spreadsheet output file
- TagToRDF - Convert a tag format input file to an RDF format output file
- RdfToTag - Convert an RDF format input file to a tag format output file
- RdfToHtml - Convert an RDF format input file to an HTML web page output file
- RdfToSpreadsheet - Convert an RDF format input file to a spreadsheeet format output file
- SpreadsheetToRDF - Convert a spreadsheet input file to an RDF format output file
- SpreadsheetToTag - Convert a spreadsheet input file to a tag format output file
- SPDXViewer - Display an SPDX document input file (in either tag/value or RDF format)
- CompareMultipleSpdxDocs - Compare multiple SPDX documents (in either tag/value or RDF formats) and output to a spreadsheet
- CompareSpdxDocs - Compare two SPDX documents (in either tag/value or RDF format)
- GenerateVerificationCode - Geneinkrate a Verification Code from a directory of files.
SPDX Maven Plugin is a plugin to Maven which produces Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) documents for artifacts described in the POM file.
For the purposes of the project and this survey, evaluation made on commercial open source tools is largely based on listing known tools. Some evaluation and grouping has been made regarding the advertised amount of specified integrations. All seem to offer a REST API to be used for further integrations. In addition to integrations, security vulnerability scanning seems to be a part of these offerings, either as a product feature or a sister product. The information has been gathered from the respective websites of every commercial tool provider.
Extensive integrations (over 15 advertised integrations)
Flexera
BlackDuck by Synopsys
Fossa
WhiteSource
Nexus by Sonatype
OpenLogic by Rogue Wave Software
Some integrations (5-15 advertised integrations)
Few integrations (1-5 advertised integrations)
Integrations not specified
TripleCheck
DejaCode by NexB
FOSSID
Insigniary
- Polarion
- Team Foundation Server
- JIRA
- Github/Gitlab/other Git service
- Eclipse
- Visual Studio
- Qt Creator
- Netbeans IDE
- JetBrains CLion
- JetBrains GoLand
- JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA
- JetBrains PhpStorm
- JetBrains PyCharm
- JetBrains Rider
- JetBrains RubyMine
- JetBrains WebStorm
- Android Studio
- SVN
- Git
- GitLab
- Bitbucket
- GitHub
- Jenkins
- Team Foundation Server
- Bamboo
- TeamCity
- CircleCI
- Azure DevOps (ent. Team Services)
- Travis CI
- GitLab CI
- Concourse
- AWS CodeBuild
- Codeship
- Drone.io
- wercker
- Go.CD
- Semaphore
- Appveyor
- Buildkite
- Cmake
- Yocto / OpenEmbedded
- BitBake
- Visual Studio
- Apache Maven
- Gradle
- npm
- yarn
- pip / pipenv
- Conda
- Composer
- sbt
- Make
- Apache Ant
- Webpack
- Go Search
- npm registry
- Packagist (the PHP Package Repository)
- Maven repositories
- PyPI (Python Package Index)
- RubyGems.org
- NuGet
- Bower
- CPAN
- Cargo (crates.io)
- "PEAR (PHP Extension and Application
- Repository)"
- PlatformIO registry
- Nexus Repository
- JFrog Artifactory
- Flowdock
- Confluence
- Robot Framework
- Cypress
- RedwoodHQ
- Selenium
- Serenity
- Citrus Framework
- TestRail
- qTest
- Docker
- Cloud Foundry
- Atomic
- OpenShift
- Kubernetes