Ninka license finder tool, and more

[Benjamin Fleischer]

I recently submitted a PR to the heroku_12factor project https://github.com/heroku/rails_12factor/pull/11 which I used LicenseFinder on to identify the licenses.

Do you have any idea how licenses inherit from one another and if code should include that information?

While googling about this, I found project and related paper to what looks like a pretty rigorous license finder tool (alas, AGPLv3+) so I thought I'd share in case you haven't seen it

http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers/dmg2010ninka.pdf (also related http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers/dmg2010_icpc.pdf )

http://ninka.turingmachine.org/

https://github.com/dmgerman/ninka

http://sanacl.wordpress.com/tag/ninka/

I also found this stackoverflow question with interesting related questions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15325405/are-open-source-libraries-that-are-dependencies-of-another-open-source-library-a

* cool chart http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1647059/what-exactly-are-the-rules-for-using-gpl-lgpl-bsd-software-interally-in-the-en?rq=1

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10510674/lgpl-gpl-apache-bsd-mit-license-and-its-usage-in-a-non-open-source-proprieta?rq=1

Also, unrelated, what would you think of a dropdown option on the licenseaudit.pivotallabs.com to not include private repos?  Whenever I log in, I just change the token request from repo to public_repo, but that's annoying. See https://gemcanary.com/login for example

-Benjamin

[Brent Wheeldon]

Hi Benjamin,

I'm not sure what the correct answer is on how gems should incorporate the licenses of any dependencies they may have. Our goal with licence_finder (and license audit) is to simply surface the licensing information gem owners include in their gem, not to make any adjudications on what license a gem should have based it its dependencies.

As for the LicenseAudit feature request, I like it. I've added a story to our Tracker backlog.

Cheers,

Brent