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Getting started

The AboutCode community designs, develops, and sustains an open source ecosystem of interoperable tools, accurate data, and practical standards to enable organizations of any size to identify open source or other third-party software, automate license compliance, and improve software supply chain security. AboutCode software and data can provide a comprehensive solution for some organizations, or an organization can reuse AboutCode "building blocks" in their own systems and workflows.

The purpose of this Getting Started section is to help you understand what software or data AboutCode projects provide so that you can determine how to best use them to meet your requirements for software identification, license compliance and supply chain security. Our approach is to describe common use cases and show you how specific AboutCode capabilities apply to those use cases.

The use cases are grouped according to 3 major topics:

  • Software identification
  • License compliance
  • Supply chain security

If you already know which AboutCode projects you are interested in you can find project information in the AboutCode Projects Overview section of the home page of this website. Each project card provides comprehensive project information including:

  • Description
  • Documentation URL
  • GitHub Repository URL
  • Licenses for software, data and services as applicable
  • Primary language
  • Platform

The projects are presented in 5 categories:

  • Applications: These projects offer an application that you can install in the cloud or a local environment.
  • ScanCode: These projects are components or extensions of ScanCode.
  • Package-URL: These projects provide tools and data to support the use of the PURL (Package-URL) or VERS (Version Range Specifier) specifications.
  • Inspectors: AboutCode Inspectors are special-purpose analysis tools. You can run them as a ScanCode Toolkit plugin, as steps in a ScanCode.io pipeline, or from the command line.
  • Libraries: AboutCode libraries are key building blocks for the AboutCode software and data stack - they have also been incorporated into other major FOSS projects and are available for use by anyone.

If you have questions about how to apply AboutCode building blocks to your requirements, please join one of our community meetings or on Gitter or Slack. See our Meetings page for details.