Completely redesigned build and release system that standardizes many file locations, environment variables, and other parameters important to FOSSology. It also conforms to open source software community norms and expectations for software builds and installations; separates the build- time assumptions and dependencies from the install-time, making it possible to create FOSSology packages for Linux distributions (Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc)
Huge optimizations in database schema design which provide a 50x (or better) speed improvement in user interface response times. The time taken to retrieve and display a software license analysis report has been reduced from tens of minutes to just seconds for nearly any size analysis.
Addition of license report caching, which lets the system store a snapshot of a previously-run report and supply it to users instantly upon request without regenerating any portions of the report. Combined with the database optimizations, these two features make the FOSSology UI very usable.
Huge optimizations in the license analysis algorithm, speeding up license analysis jobs by as much as 10x. A full Fedora DVD release that would have taken a week or longer to process can now be completed in 24-48 hours. (NOTE: analysis times vary significantly based on the system performance, CPU, memory, etc)
Major improvements in license detection accuracy: We have spent considerable time refining the license template and license terms that we scan for, so that FOSSology now provides a much more accurate picture of the actual license content of open source software. We will continue this refinement in future releases, and encourage everyone to provide feedback on areas for improvement, but we feel this is a very good balance of accuracy and flexibility in license reporting.
Software packaging of FOSSology for the Debian Linux distribution. For the first time, the FOSSology project will be providing a complete DEB package to enable simple installation of FOSSology on most DEB-based Linux systems.
A new “self-test” agent that allows the FOSSology system to validate that it was installed and set up properly, and report any configuration issues to the system administrator. Also provides run-time configuration checking to make sure that filesystem permissions, database connections, and other services critical to FOSSology are up and running.
An automated test suite based on the open source SimpleTest framework, that includes tests to verify that major parts of the FOSSology web-based User Interface are operating correctly. These tests can be run by anyone installing the FOSSology system, to verify proper operation, and also by anyone developing new features and functionality in FOSSology, to test their work and ensure that it does not create any new bugs in the existing code.
As always you can install FOSSology from source - follow the link to Download to get the tarball from Sourceforge or the live subversion repository. Read the INSTALL file for detailed instructions.
But we're happy to announce the availability of Debian packages! We have a (temporary) apt repository available here:
deb http://fossology.org/debian/ ./
If you add this line to your Deb-based system's sources.list file, then you should be able to simply enter
apt-get install fossology
And the world will become a better place.
The Project Builder (http://trac.project-builder.org/) project is working on RPM packages for FOSSology which should eventually work on most RPM-based systems such as RedHat, SuSE, Mandrivia, etc. These packages are not yet fully tested by us or them! Stay tuned for more information.
There are now three key documents distributed with the FOSSology source code:
README provides a general description and introduction to FOSSology
INSTALL provides detailed instructions for building, installing and configuring FOSSology from source code. (INSTALL.multi provides details for setting up a cluster of multiple FOSSology servers)
HACKING provides details about how to modify the way FOSSology is built; this is primarily intended for advanced users, software packagers, etc
As always you can view the complete project documentation online anytime in user documentation. For developers or other technical users, you can peruse the developer documentation.
* On Fedora systems, there is a problem with the authentication method FOSSology uses by default, which is different than the Fedora Postgres package configuration. As a result, an out-of-the-box FOSSology install on Fedora will not work correctly. We are working on a fix now.
* RPMs for FOSSology 1.0 are being built now, and may be available from the Project Builder project. However these are “alpha” quality for now, and need considerable testing.
