The System Package Data Exchange (SPDX®) specification is an open standard designed to represent systems containing software components as Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). Additionally, SPDX supports AI, data, and security references, making it suitable for a wide range of risk management use cases.
The SPDX standard helps facilitate compliance with free and open source software licenses by standardizing the way license information is shared across the software supply chain. SPDX reduces redundant work by providing a common format for companies and communities to share important data about software licenses and copyrights, thereby streamlining and improving compliance.
The specification is comprised of documents located in thedocs/directory
of thisspdx/spdx-specrepository, as well as a model documentation
generated from Markdown files within the
spdx/spdx-3-modelrepository.
Thisspdx/spdx-specrepository holds under active development version
of the specification as:
- Markdown:
development/v3.0.1branch - HTML:
gh-pagesbranch, built on every commit to the development branch- Current stable (v3.0.1):https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v3.0.1/
Contributions are welcome. Contributions to this repository are made pursuant to the SPDX Community Specification Contributor License Agreement 1.0. Please see the contributing guidelines, governance practices, and build instructions in the related documentssection.
This repository consists of these files and directories (partial):
.github/workflow- Workflow definitions.publish_v3.ymlThe website (HTML) generation workflow.
bin/- Scripts for spec generation.docs/- Specification content:annexes/- Annexes for the specification.css/- Style sheets for HTML.front/- Front matter.images/- Model diagrams. These image files are to be generated from a diagram description file model.drawio inspdx/spdx-3-modelrepo and manually copied here.licenses/- Licenses that used by the SPDX specifications.model/- Model files. This subdirectoryis to be createdby a script fromspdx/spec-parserrepo, using model information fromspdx/spdx-3-modelrepo (see the build instructions below).
examples/- Examples of various SPDX serializations for the current version of the spec.mkdocs.yml- MkDocs recipe for the spec documentation generation. The inclusion of model files and the order of chapters are defined here.
| Documentation | Link |
|---|---|
| Changes between versions | CHANGELOG.md |
| Contributing guidelines | CONTRIBUTING.md |
| Building the specification website (for testing purpose) | build.md |
| Governance practices | spdx/governance |
| SPDX 3 model development | spdx/spdx-3-model |
| Model specification parser | spdx/spec-parser |
| How to use the specification | spdx/using |
| Use cases and scenarios | spdx/spdx-examples |
| SPDX website, with more information about the specification | https://spdx.org |
| Official releases of the specification, including PDFs | https://spdx.org/specifications |