HP, with other pro-open-source companies and organizations, is releasing programs and policies to help enterprises track corporate open-source use.

After a soft-launch in December, Hewlett-Packard on Jan. 23 officially released a pair of new open-source initiatives to help businesses and developers track their free and open-source software programs and licenses: FOSSology and FOSSBazaar.

HP is not doing this on its own. While the open-source management and tracking programs and business processes underlying these initiatives were created by HP, these new initiatives also have the support of The Linux Foundation, Google, Novell, Olliance Group, OpenLogic, SourceForge, international law firm DLA Piper and source-code analysis company Coverity.

The point of these paired projects is to help enterprises and developers track their open-source software assets. HP officials pointed to a recent example with a customer. They said that HP found three times as many FOSS licenses—75—as the customer initially thought. This meant the customer had to choose whether to implement governance policies to allow the safe use of FOSS or replace the software, which would have cost about $80 million.

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