Eclipse SW360antenna is a tool to automate your open source license compliance processes as much as possible. In the end that is
- collecting all compliance relevant data,
- process that data and warn if there might be any license compliance related issues, and
- generating a set of compliance artifacts (source code bundle, disclosure document, report)
for your project.
To reflect those three different types of tasks SW360antenna is built around a workflow engine, which allows to orchestrate a set of analyzers to gather required information, processors to arrange, adjust and evaluate that data, and a set of generators to produce a set of compliance related artifacts. Since licensing issues can deeply affect the success of your project it is required to be notified about any issues as early as possible in the development process. It is therefore useful to generate that information directly within your build. SW360antenna can directly be integrated into the build process. This is realized with several so called frontends to build systems, which allow to invoke the tool and provide it with necessary configuration.
The SW360antenna project is set up in a way that allows to easily create a custom configuration with a preconfigured set of shipped and custom analyzers, processors and generators to fit the needs of your internal compliance processes. E.g. You might use a commercial tool to analyze your dependencies and do not rely on the results of the maven dependency plugin. In that case you can provide a custom analyzer implementation, provide a custom configuration and bundle that as the tool, which can be used by your development teams to scan their projects.