Project Ideas Improve NPM package license detection

Improve NPM package license detection

The goal of this project is to improve NPM package license detection across the board. While scancode-toolkit's NPM package detection is pretty good, there a few repeat cases where license information is not properly gathered from NPM package metadata. Usually this is because a declared_license value contains things we did not expect (like a URL) or is improperly formed.

This project would be a mix of adding new license detection rules to scancode, adding new and improved code to handle the specific patterns of license, creating new license mappings and possibly working with upstream maintainers to improve their license declarations. The approach should be to start with a complete data set of all package manifests and find patterns of license issues and establish the baseline, possibly with classifiers and ML. The end results should be a significant improvement to the license detection quality for the NPM packages.

See https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/issues/2488 for details

• Level
  • Intermediate
• Tech
  • Python
• URLS
• Mentors
  • @pombredanne https://github.com/pombredanne
  • @majurg https://github.com/majurg