---
title: "How SEW-EURODRIVE Built Scalable Open Source License Compliance with FOSSA"
description: "Learn how SEW-EURODRIVE built scalable open source license compliance with FOSSA — continuous scanning, custom policies, and automated issue triage."
canonical_url: "https://fossa.com/customers/sew-eurodrive/"
markdown_url: "https://fossa.com/customers/sew-eurodrive.md"
content_type: "customer-story"
language: "en"
date_published: "2026-08-14"
date_modified: "2026-08-14"
author: "FOSSA"
organization: "FOSSA"
---

# How SEW-EURODRIVE Built Scalable Open Source License Compliance with FOSSA

> Learn how SEW-EURODRIVE automates open source license compliance with FOSSA across embedded and drive-system software.

[SEW-EURODRIVE](https://www.seweurodrive.com/home.html) is one of the world's leading suppliers of drive and automation technology. Founded in 1931, the Germany-based company builds the gear units, motors, drive electronics, and automation systems that move production lines, conveyor systems, and mobile logistics platforms in factories around the world.

Increasingly, those systems ship with software inside, including open source libraries. This results in products with open source components getting distributed, embedded into customer machinery, and supported over long product lifecycles.

That’s a big reason why SEW-EURODRIVE has made [open source license compliance](https://fossa.com/solutions/oss-license-compliance.md) a priority initiative. Every [copyleft obligation](https://fossa.com/blog/all-about-copyleft-licenses.md), attribution requirement, and license conflict has to be identified and resolved before a product leaves the building.

Given the scale of its operations, SEW-EURODRIVE determined that it needed an automated way to manage the OSS license compliance lifecycle. After evaluating open source and commercial tooling, SEW-EURODRIVE decided FOSSA was the right solution for its license compliance needs.

> "We wanted continuous open source compliance that integrates simply into everyday workflows — a 'set-and-forget' solution with automatic notifications once new issues are found, and great traceability of decisions that gives us confidence and trust in the tool's results."

— Lukas Panni, Software Engineer, SEW-EURODRIVE

## SEW-EURODRIVE’S Tooling Assessment Process

SEW-EURODRIVE worked through an extensive evaluation process before deciding on FOSSA to automate OSS license compliance management.

The team initially evaluated a tool adept at license detection. However, that tool was slow and wasn't built to help teams identify and resolve licensing issues once they'd been found.

SEW-EURODRIVE’s next tooling assessment focused on a solution that performed adequately detecting dependencies and licenses. However, the tool required an enormous manual undertaking. It wasn't well suited to continuous analysis, and it couldn't be adopted without adding significant overhead to development teams.

Those experiences helped SEW-EURODRIVE arrive at a clear evaluation criteria. The tool would need to:

- **Scan file contents, not just file hashes**, so real license text is evaluated rather than matched
- **Support the entire stack**: C/C++, C#, Go, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Rust; build systems including Yocto, ELBE, Cordova, and Capacitor; and containers from Alpine and Debian
- **Run continuously**, analyzing every pushed change so issues surface early
- **Trace every license decision** back to the specific file in the specific component responsible
- **Make obligations visible**, answering the question of what actually has to be done for compliant use
- **Deliver a strong developer experience**, with an easy CLI, a usable UI, an extensible API, SBOM and human-readable reporting, and real support behind it

With those criteria set, SEW-EURODRIVE evaluated FOSSA and another popular fully featured license compliance automation tool head to head. FOSSA was the clear choice for several reasons:

1. Superior automation through custom policies and automatic reuse of clearing decisions
2. Strong traceability that made decisions both trustworthy and auditable
3. Clear visibility into license obligations
4. Simple integration into everyday developer workflows, with room to extend into more complex CI/CD scenarios.

> "We wanted a unified CI integration that works for every project. FOSSA's simple integration into everyday workflows, plus its extensibility for more complex integrations, made that possible."

— Lukas Panni, Software Engineer, SEW-EURODRIVE

## SEW-EURODRIVE’S License Compliance Automation

The core of SEW-EURODRIVE’s open source license compliance program is a set of policies that dictate whether specific licenses should be approved, flagged, or denied. For example, the [MIT License](https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-licenses-101-mit-license.md) might be approved, the [LGPL](https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-lgpl-license.md) might be flagged (with the final approve/deny decision based on how the library is linked), and the [AGPL](https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-agpl-license.md) might be denied.

FOSSA’s policy engine helped SEW-EURODRIVE build its desired policy workflows. SEW-EURODRIVE utilized FOSSA’s pre-configured policies (which were created with guidance from leading legal experts like Heather Meeker) as a starting point, and built additional customizations on top.

In FOSSA, an organization’s policy settings serve as the foundation for creating licensing issues. For example, if a FOSSA scan detects a license on an organization’s “deny” list, it will create an “Issue” within the FOSSA application. (Note that FOSSA also gives organizations the ability to break a build in the event a flagged or denied license is detected.)

When an issue surfaces, FOSSA shows the specific files in the component that matched the license, the policy's own notes on that license (including why it isn't permitted, or what conditions apply), every possible dependency path for transitive dependencies, and the rest of the dependency's metadata. That context gives SEW EURODRIVE’s developers the actionable insights they need for triage, across three key steps:

1. **Whether the component is used at all:** Components fall out of use and can sometimes be removed from the project entirely.
2. **Whether the affected source code is actually distributed:** Licenses attached to build, test, and documentation tooling are usually not relevant to the shipped product — a distinction that matters enormously in embedded development, where a project's Python dependencies may exist only to build documentation that never leaves the company.
3. **Whether the policy has a usage exception**: SEW-EURODRIVE requires additional confirmation for certain licenses. If a developer meets the conditions the policy note specifies, they can confirm and clear the issue themselves.

On the surface, this three-step process may seem somewhat time-consuming. However, SEW-EURODRIVE uses FOSSA’s “Ignore Rules” feature to significantly reduce the associated manual toil. When an issue is ignored with an appropriate reason (such as a denied license on a test-only dependency), that “Ignore” reason can be applied automatically across all current and future projects. The same is true of clearing decisions generally: FOSSA reuses them automatically rather than re-surfacing settled questions.

## The Bottom Line: SEW-EURODRIVE and OSS License Compliance

SEW-EURODRIVE's intelligent OSS license compliance workflows, combined with FOSSA’s automation, have created a compliance program that runs continuously and requires configuration only where the project genuinely demands it.

Analysis runs on every pushed change through a centrally managed CI integration. Policies encode licensing judgment once and apply it everywhere. Issue details trace every finding to a specific file in a specific component. And Ignore Rules ensure that a decision made today doesn't have to be made again next sprint, on the next project, by the next team.

The combination of SEW-EURODRIVE’S expertise and FOSSA’s tooling has enabled a sustainable and scalable license compliance initiative across teams, product lines, and version releases.

## Source

Canonical page: https://fossa.com/customers/sew-eurodrive/