The Open Source Census, OSS Discovery, FOSSology and FOSSBazaar!

Lots of big news in the open source world.  (No worries - not another acquisition!)

FOSSBazaar launched today - with OpenLogic as one of its founding partners.  Last week HP also announced that they released FOSSology as open source.  This is on the heels of OpenLogic's announcement of the Open Source Census and the open sourcing of our tool OSSDiscovery.  This is all really cool because together these make a great tool box.  We've been getting a lot of questions about whether FOSSology does the same thing as Discovery (short answer is no) and how FOSSBazaar fits with Open Source Census.  Here's what they do:

• OSS Discovery - scans any number of machines and generates a list of all of the installed open source software and version numbers, regardless of license.  OpenLogic released OSS Discovery as open source last month.  We’re looking for people that want to expand the fingerprint library, so go to ossdiscovery.org to learn more.   
  
• FOSSology - scans source code and generates a list of all the copyrights and licenses it finds.  It doesn't identify what open source packages are installed - it finds licenses.  HP released it as open source last week.  FOSSology and OSS Discovery are complementary, and will often be used together -- OSS Discovery to inventory open source software across a number of machines, and FOSSology to identify the licenses.
• FOSSBazaar - a website where you can find open source governance resources (including links to tools like OSS Discovery and FOSSology), and share best practices.  It was launched by a group of companies, led by HP, but it's a working group of the Linux Foundation and has nine partners sharing resources: Linux Foundation, HP, OpenLogic, Olliance Group, Novell, SourceForge, DLA Piper, Google and Coverity.
• Open Source Census - a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in the enterprise.  It collects and consolidates the data found by OSS Discovery.   Results will be shared publicly to encourage the use of open source software! It's an initiative started by OpenLogic and we will soon announce partners - we have over half a dozen signed up.
  

OpenLogic is excited to be a member of FOSSBazaar, and to share and talk about open source governance best practices, and we are glad that enterprises will now have access to tools like OSS Discovery and FOSSology.  We believe they will use OSS Discovery to inventory their systems and then they'll use FOSSology to get a picture of what copyrights and licenses they are dealing with.  We currently use both tools at OpenLogic today.Follow @openlogic
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