Developers in all organization sizes across the globe are looking to save time and stop reinventing the wheel. Often, they use third-party open source components to solve their problems. Typically, these components are publicly available, free of charge, and with a large community support. Nevertheless, some dependencies are associated to viral licenses, which contaminate the source code of the application being developed. These licenses force developers to release the application code under the same conditions.

Licenses such as the General Public License (GPL) introduce a risk into the development process of closed source and dual license software vendors. Having a GPL dependency exposes your company, among other consequences, to lawsuits and devaluation of its software assets. Furthermore, if contaminant dependencies are not discovered early enough, the cost of replacing them can be huge. Replacing a contaminant library may imply investing time and money searching for suitable open source or commercial options and replacing the existing dependency.

Scanning and collecting data is time consuming, painful, and not necessarily accurate. 

Antepedia Reporter automatically scans all files in a directory, collecting pertinent and essential information about the code you reuse (original project, licences, versions, level of reuse, ...). It enables you to react faster and more effectively to soften the license risk.