About

remixware.com is the home of Remixware, a free tool that finds code in your project that came from open source, names the licence it came with, and tells you what that licence asks of you. It runs on your own machine and reads your code there. It sends nothing anywhere unless you ask it to check with SCANOSS, and then only fingerprints of your files go out.

Why It Exists

Code moves between projects all the time, and it rarely comes with a note saying where it was before. Each copy carries the terms of the project it came from, and those terms don’t show in the code. An MIT helper needs its copyright line kept. A GPL function can force the whole program it lands in to go out under the GPL.

Most teams only find out when someone else looks: a customer’s legal team, a buyer doing due diligence, or the author of the code. Remixware lets you look first.

The Name

A remix is a new work built from pieces of other works, and most software is made that way now. Remixware means software built from other software. Reuse is how open source is meant to work, and the name is happy about it. Every piece you reuse also came with terms, and Remixware’s job is to show you which ones. The story behind the name has more.

How It’s Built

  • Fingerprints. Remixware reads source code as tokens, drops comments and layout, and numbers the names, so a copy with new formatting or renamed variables still matches. It keeps a sample of hashes from every file and looks for long runs that two files share.
  • Licences from the source. Each match is traced to a component, and the component’s licence is read from its licence files and its manifest, together with any licence notice at the top of the copied file. A table of how licences combine turns that into a status: conflict, no licence, review, attribution missing or fine.
  • Your index, or SCANOSS. You build an index from the code you want to compare with, such as your dependencies or a project you suspect. For a check against a large share of all public open source, Remixware asks the free SCANOSS service, or reads the results of SCANOSS’s own scanner.
  • Tested in the open. The tests plant thousands of copies of real open source functions, changed in different ways, and count how many come back to the right source. The results are published with the code.

License

All the code is open source under the Apache License 2.0, on GitHub. You can use it, change it and build it into your own products.

Questions People Ask

No. Remixware tells you where code came from and what its licence says in general terms, so you can decide what to do or know when to ask a lawyer. Some findings need a person’s judgement, and Remixware marks those for review.

Does it upload my code?

No. On its own, Remixware connects to nothing. With --scanoss it sends the SCANOSS service fingerprints of your files: for each file a number with the file’s extension, its MD5 checksum and size, and hashes of its text. The code and the file names stay on your machine. What leaves your machine shows it for one file.

Which languages does it read?

Go, C and C++, Objective-C, Java, C#, Dart, Kotlin, Swift, Scala, JavaScript and TypeScript, Rust, Python, Ruby, PHP, shell, Perl, SQL, Lua, CSS, R, Julia, Elixir, Nim, PowerShell and Tcl. The reference has the full list.

Will it find every copy?

No tool can. Remixware needs the original in an index or in SCANOSS’s knowledge base, and its own matching skips copies shorter than 50 tokens or 5 lines, because short code looks alike in every project. How it was tested shows what it finds and what it misses.

Who makes it?

Remixware is a SoftDevStudio.com project.