When your development teams leverage open-source libraries alongside their proprietary code, or they include a linux kernel or real-time operating system in their distribution package, licensing considerations are often overlooked. License questions usually show up at the worst possible time: right before a release or during a customer audit, and someone asks, “What is our legal risk?”
Most teams have an incomplete or dispersed view of license data. It lives in SBOMs, manifests, package managers, spreadsheets, and email threads. What they do not have is a reliable way to turn that data into clear, evidence-backed findings that legal, product, and compliance teams can use to identify risk associated with use of third-party IP.
NetRise License Intelligence is designed to fix that. Instead of a pile of license strings, you get normalized views of license risk in components in your binary image so teams can make faster, defensible decisions.
The problem: License risk built into how software is assembled
Most license problems do not start in legal. They start in how software is built.
1. Developers include libraries to ship features, not manage licenses
Teams pull in open source components because they solve a problem or unblock a deadline. They are rarely compliance experts, and license terms are easy to miss when the immediate pressure is “make this work.”
2. Transitive dependencies introduce licenses nobody saw coming
Even when a team checks the license on the library they chose, they are often unaware of the licenses on its dependencies. A component that looks compatible with commercial distribution can quietly pull in another library that is not, and that risk travels with every product that includes it.
3. Base images and bundled stacks carry inherited license risk
When developers include Linux kernels, userland packages, or vendor SDKs inside a device image, they may be inheriting license obligations from code they did not write or even review. Those obligations attach to the distribution that ships to customers, not just to the proprietary code layered on top.
Traditional SBOMs and source-level tools can show what was declared at the time of build, but they often miss how these choices play out in the actual binaries and images that go out the door. That is where NetRise’s ability to accurately and comprehensively identify components in binary images matters: it gives legal and compliance a more complete view of these inherited and transitive license issues in the software you actually distribute.
What you can do with NetRise License Intelligence
Instead of another scanner that returns raw license strings, NetRise License Intelligence focuses on three things counsel and compliance teams need: where license risk exists in the software you ship, what those findings mean, and how risk is being reduced over time.
Here is what you can expect from NetRise License Intelligence:
1. Identify where your shipped software is at license risk
The License Issues tab turns scattered SBOM rows into concrete issues tied to specific assets. NetRise detects license information directly from firmware, containers, and other binaries and groups it into issue categories such as “License Ambiguity” or “Missing License.” Legal and compliance can see which components and versions in a given distribution carry license problems that may require review.
2. Get guidance on what each issue means and your options
Clicking an issue opens a summary written for reviewers. You see a description of why the issue matters in practice and a Potential Solutions section that outlines common next steps, such as clarifying the intended license with a supplier, correcting or consolidating metadata, or replacing the component. License details are normalized to SPDX and use the license names your internal policies already reference, which makes it easier to compare findings to existing guidance.
3. See which products and versions are actually in scope
License questions are rarely about a single library in isolation. NetRise evaluates license issues across both direct and transitive dependencies so you can see how a problematic license flows into a finished image. That helps you answer questions like “which firmware versions include this component” or “which commercial distributions are affected if we change our stance on this license” without rebuilding dependency spreadsheets by hand.
4. Track remediation and build a defensible record
Each license issue includes its status and supporting evidence. Reviewers can see what is unreviewed, what is in progress, and what has been remediated, along with the component, license expressions, and dependency path that justified the decision. Findings are evaluated against your configurable rules, so the same policies are applied consistently and the rationale is documented for audits, customer questions, and internal approvals.
How NetRise License Intelligence works
1) Detect license evidence across artifacts
NetRise collects license signals from package metadata, manifests, embedded license and notice files, and other markers in each asset.
2) Normalize and categorize licenses
Detected licenses are normalized to SPDX identifiers and categorized by type, such as copyleft, permissive, proprietary, or unknown, so findings speak the same language as your policies.
3) Map licenses across dependency graphs
License Intelligence analyzes direct and transitive dependencies to show how a license flows into a finished image and where relational conflicts or missing license metadata appear.
4) Produce issues with evidence and policy context
Findings are evaluated against your configurable rules and presented as discrete license issues with status and supporting evidence, ready for legal, product, and security teams to review.
Where NetRise License Intelligence fits in legal and compliance workflows
License Intelligence is most useful where you need to make a clear, defensible call on open source use in shipped software.
Teams use it during:
- Release readiness checks to see which images and versions carry license issues before a product goes out the door.
- Customer questionnaires and contract reviews to answer “which products include this license” with concrete evidence rather than spreadsheets.
- Audit and regulator prep to show how license issues were identified, reviewed, and remediated over time.
License risk is not only which licenses appear, it is where they appear and how consistently you can see them. By normalizing license strings to SPDX, mapping them across dependency graphs, and tying each license back to specific components and files, License Intelligence gives legal, GRC, and engineering a shared view of the facts. That shared record makes reviews faster, more consistent, and easier to document when you need to explain a decision.
How License Intelligence extends what NetRise already does
At NetRise, the mission is to illuminate invisible risk inside device software and compiled applications. The platform also provides:
- Binary-derived SBOMs
- Vulnerability enrichment and context
- Cryptography inventory
- Secrets detection and other non-CVE signals
License Intelligence extends that visibility into the licensing layer. Instead of treating licenses as an optional field in SBOM exports, the platform now treats them as first-class signals: normalized to SPDX, mapped across dependency graphs, and tied back to the binaries and files where they appear.
Every connected device and application is built from layers of third-party code. Only some of that code carries licenses your organization need to know about, and only some of those licenses raise questions for how you ship and operate software. NetRise helps you see where those licenses actually live so legal, GRC, and engineering can review the same evidence and make defensible decisions.
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