WhatTheFOSS.com was started when two auditors came in to conduct an IT audit at our organization. These two auditors saw the amount of installed software, most of which were Free and/or Open Source Software (FOSS).
What the FOSS?! How are you managing all of this? You can’t, you just can’t
We told them we where managing it well but that got us thinking… We don’t know what we don’t know about what we don’t know.
Part of our audit recommendations asked us to create a “Software Management Program” which was was not the fun kind of program that’s written in Basic unfortunately. But why couldn’t it be? We couldn’t be the only organization that needs to track FOSS, or manage any software for that matter. So our Software Management Program became an actual program or a series of scripts known as the SoftwareMatrix
Originally created as a joke in 2017, WhatTheFOSS.com will soon host the WhatTheFOSS list, a list of Free and Open Source Software with links to actual versioning information. People need to know if their installed software is up-to-date and a lot of websites obfuscate their versioning, why? The goal is to develop a list that can be directly imported into the SoftwareMatrix tool to automatically categorize this software as FOSS and notify the IT admins as to whether it is at the latest version.