FAQ

I'm a developer. This seems easy to automate. Why use FOSSA?

FOSSA makes it easy for you. We've built our tools over months and years of hard work, and have considered edge cases which may cost you days of work. While automating may be an option, it is almost certainly not in the best interest of your time and effort to make a homegrown system, when you can rely on our expertise and tools to do the work for you.

Why is dynamic build analysis important?

Why is FOSSA better than auditing?

Who else uses FOSSA?

Does FOSSA have a free plan?

Yes; you're free to use FOSSA for up to 5 repositories, either public or private. This allows you to have continuous dependency tracking and license checks to keep your code clean, for free. You're also free to use the fossa-cli tool which we've open sourced locally, although that does not come with CI or automated updates.

If you are a non-profit, educational institution or based in open source, we offer special plans for your budget. Get in touch.

How does contributor counting work?

How do I get one of those nifty "license scan" badges?

Why do you ask for write permissions for private repositories?

Why is FOSSA always capitalized?

Because it is an acronym! FOSSA stands for Free Open Source Software Analysis. We're dedicated to the FOSS ecosystem, as we believe that open source is the future. FOSSA exists to help make developing on a FOSS stack easier, by removing the stress of licensing from the equation.