Detect License

Tools for detecting the type, author, and year of a software license.

Note that the author of a license may be different than the author of the software. For example, GPLv2 licenses are commonly attributed to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This project was motivated by Thomas Fuchs' Why I’d like a “license type” setting for GitHub projects , 5 April 2012.

Installing

$ (sudo) python setup.py install

Usage

$ detect_license.py --help
usage: detect_license.py [-h] [-f FILENAME] [-u URL]

Detect license

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FILENAME, --filename FILENAME
  -u URL, --url URL

Examples

Jekyll's MIT license,

$ detect_license.py --url https://raw.github.com/mojombo/jekyll/master/LICENSE
Author: Tom Preston-Werner
Year: 2008
Type: MIT

jQuery's GPLv2 license,

$ detect_license.py --url https://raw.github.com/jquery/jquery/master/GPL-LICENSE.txt
Author: Free Software Foundation
Year: 1991
Type: GPLv2

Supported Licenses

• MIT License
• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• Affero General Public License (AGPL)

Requirements

• Python 2.5 (or better)