The FOSSology project started out as an internal development effort at Hewlett Packard Company (HP). As part of HP's own internal IT governance process, HP needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed. Thus was born FOSSology – “The study of FOSS.”

Currently, FOSSology provides a free license agent that scans and analyzes data for potential software licenses. You can find How To’s (upload files for analysis, interpreting license results, ect.) and other FOSSology topics, such as FAQ on its User Documentation page.

Copyrights of the original FOSSology source code and all associated documentation are owned by HP. All of the FOSSology source code is licensed under the GNU GPL v. 2, except that libfossdb and libfossrepo libraries are licensed under the LGPLv2.1. FOSSology Project documentation is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License v.1.2.

OSSF provides instant VDI image file for FOSSology license scan agent. If you are interested in this system, you can download it here.

Black Duck Software provides a similar tool, Black Duck™ Transact, which can quickly identify open source and other third party code within a software code base and their related licenses.

(Much of the information here was extracted from the website https://fossology.org/. Please visit this site for more information.)