AboutCode

What is AboutCode?

AboutCode is a family of FOSS projects to uncover data ... about software:

• where does the code come from? which software package?
• what is its license? copyright?
• is the code vulnerable, maintained, well coded?
• what are its dependencies, are there vulneribilities/licensing issues?

All these are questions that are important to answer: there are millions of free and open source software components available on the web for reuse.

Knowing where a software package comes from, what its license is and whether it is vulnerable should be a problem of the past such that everyone can safely consume more free and open source software. We support not only open source software, but also open data, generated and curated by our applications.

NOTE: This is a repository with information on aboutcode open source activities and not the actual code repository. See the projects section below for links to all the code repositories of our projects with a brief overview and our wiki if you are looking to participate.

Documentation Build Status

Important Links

Our homepage is at http://aboutcode.org

Our documentation (in progress) is at https://aboutcode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Join the chat online at app.gitter.im : aboutcode-org#discuss or if you're using the element app set the homeserver to gitter.im and then join the aboutcode-org#discuss chatroom. Introduce yourself and start the discussion!

Look at our wiki for information about our participation in the GSoC and GSoD programs.

We have a weekly meeting, see more details here.

Projects

Each AboutCode project has its own repository:

• ScanCode Toolkit: a set of code scanning tools to detect the origin and license of code and dependencies. ScanCode now uses a plug-in architecture to run a series of scan-related tools in one process flow. This is the most popular project and is used by 100's of software teams . The lead maintainer is @pombredanne

• Scancode.io: is a web-based and API to run and review scans in rich scripted pipelines, on different kinds of containers, docker images, package archives, manifests etc, to get information on licenses, copyrights, source, vulneribilities. The lead maintainer is @tdruez

• VulnerableCode: is a web-based API and database to collect and track all the known software package vulnerabilities, with affected and fixed packages, references and a standalone tool Vulntotal to compare this vulneribility information across similar tools. This is maintained by @tg1999 and @pombredanne

• univers is a package to parse and compare all the package versions and all the ranges.

• purlDB consists of tools to create and expose a database of purls (Package URLs) and also has package data for all of these packages created from scans. This is maintained by @jyang

• FetchCode is a library to reliably fetch any code via HTTP, FTP and version control systems such as git.

• Scancode Workbench: a desktop application based on typescript and react to visualize and review scan results from scancode scans.

• AboutCode Toolkit: a set of command line tools to document the provenance of your code and generate attribution notices. AboutCode Toolkit uses small yaml files to document code provenance inside a codebase. The lead maintainer is @chinyeungli

• container-inspector: a tool to analyze the structure and provenance of software components in Docker images using static analysis. Maintained by @pombredanne

• python-inspector and nuget inspector inspects manifests and code to resolve dependencies (vulnerable and non-vulnerable) for python and nuget packages respectively.

• license-expression: a library to parse, analyze, compare and normalize SPDX and SPDX-like license expressions using a boolean logic expression engine. See https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.jxpfx0ykyb60 to understand what an expression is. See https://github.com/nexB/license-expression for the code. The underlying boolean engine is live at https://github.com/bastikr/boolean.py . Both are co-maintained by @pombredanne

• ABCD aka AboutCode Data: a simple set of conventions to define data structures that all the AboutCode tools can understand and use to exchange data. The details are at AboutCode Data. ABOUT files and ScanCode Toolkit data are examples of this approach. Other projects such as https://libraries.io and and OSS Review Toolkit are also using these conventions.

• TraceCode Toolkit: a set of tools to trace files from your deployment or distribution packages back to their origin in a development codebase or repository. The primary tool uses strace https://github.com/strace/strace/ to trace system calls on Linux and construct a build graph from syscalls to show which files are used to build a binary. We are contributors to strace. Maintained by @pombredanne

We also co-started and worked closely with other FOSS orgs and projects:

• Package URL: a widely used standard to reference software packages of all types with simple, readable and concise URLs.

• SPDX: aka. Software Package Data Exchange, a spec to document the origin and licensing of packages.

• CycloneDX aka. OWASP CycloneDX is a full-stack Bill of Materials (BOM) standard that provides advanced supply chain capabilities for cyber risk reduction

• ClearlyDefined: a project to review and help FOSS projects improve their licensing and documentation clarity. This project is incubating with https://opensource.org