Are you often frustrated when you use FOSS code and can’t find the license or copyright holders so that you can do disclosure and attribution? Do you wish there was an easy way to get the data you need to be compliant? Are you worried when you start to use FOSS components that have ambiguous metadata?

If so, you’ll love ClearlyDefined, a community of people coming together to generate better metadata for FOSS projects. We’d love to work with you to hook our systems up to your workflow.

At ClearlyDefined, we’re on a mission to help FOSS projects thrive by being, well, more clearly defined. Lack of clarity around licenses and security vulnerabilities reduces engagement – that means fewer users, fewer contributors and a smaller community. This is a community-wide challenge and we’re taking a community-wide approach.

We want to:

• Raise awareness within FOSS project teams
• Make it easy to identify and supply missing information
• Automatically harvest data from projects
• Crowd-source the curation of that data
• Feed the curated work back to the original projects

We are building a clearing house of FOSS metadata and we’d like you to consider consuming that data. If you are using FOSS code now, it may be the case that you are already doing some of your own scanning and discovery of license metadata for yourself. ClearlyDefined can provide some of the data you need so you don’t have to do all this work on your own anymore. Even better, the data is curated by a broad community. As a consumer you get API access to harvested and curated data on a range of FOSS projects.

ClearlyDefined is a diverse and inclusive community of technical experts who are passionate about quality FOSS. If you or a colleague are interested in this role, check out https://github.com/clearlydefined for more information.