Embodiments of the present invention provide a way to accurately track and audit the intellectual property aspects in software, such as packages or distributions of open source software. An intellectual property (IP) tool analyzes software as its source code is being submitted to a code repository or as a distribution of software is being built. The IP tool parses the source code and identifies various intellectual property aspects in the code, such as licenses, trademarks, patents, and the like. The IP tool then archives this information into a database and may also provide an output that indicates the results of this analysis. The analysis by the IP tool can be provided as meta-data with the software distribution or may be provided in the form of reports that are sorted and collated in various ways for the convenience of the user.