Using an openly developed standard (SPDX), and open source tooling it is now possible to generate accurate summary information for a project with open source tools, that can be shared with those that use the project. Software development today builds thousand of open source components that developers have shared, tools permit composition of new interfaces from code from many sources, conveying the licensing information hasn't always been a priority for developers, and as a result there's a fair amount of ambiguity out there that needs sophisticated proprietary tooling to decipher the actual licenses in effect. By leveraging automation to generate this information when a project builds, it ensures that the intentions of the authors are accurate and can easily be respected.

This talk will overview the problem scope and then propose some open source tools that can help start the automation part using open standards to improve the transparency of the information.