Licenses

Overview

Every open source dependency you ship carries license obligations: attribution, source disclosure, copyleft, and more. FOSSA identifies the licenses across your dependency tree and source, surfaces what each one requires, and helps you stay compliant.

What this covers

• Understanding licensing issues: how FOSSA detects declared and discovered licenses and why an issue is raised.
• Reviewing licensing issues: work through your licensing backlog with bulk actions and triage.
• License corrections and conclusions: override or finalize the license FOSSA records for a package.
• License disputes: resolve disagreements about what a dependency is actually licensed under.
• Custom license scans: detect your own proprietary or third-party license text.

Start here

• Understanding licensing issues: the concepts behind everything else in this section.
• Reviewing licensing issues: the day-to-day workflow for clearing your backlog.

To automate enforcement of license rules, see Policies. To produce shareable attribution and compliance documents, see Reports.