HP Launches FOSSology Open Source Tracking Tool

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @03:11PM from the it-is-not-a-lawyer dept.

cpudney writes "An article in Computerworld UK reports on a new open source analysis initiative launched by Hewlett-Packard. The FOSSology Project's mission is to 'build a community to facilitate the study of Free and Open Source Software by providing free data analysis tools.' The first such tool reports how an open source project is licensed. Rather than simply collecting a project's advertised license, the tool analyzes all of the source code for a given project and reports all of the licenses being used, based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing. A video demonstrating the tool applied to abiword is available. The FOSSology source code is licensed under GPLv2."

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FOSS that solves problems created by FOSS? by filbranden · 2008-01-22 15:39 · Score: 0, Flamebait

When computers were invented, they were supposed to solve problems. Today, companies have huge IT departments just to solve computer problems that didn't existed before computers.
When FOSS started, its purpose was to write software to solve problems. Today, we're seeing FOSS written to solve FOSS problems, like licensing issues.
Doesn't it kind of defeat the point?