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> We use an open source Ruby gem called Licensee to compare the > repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses [...] I have seen more people pu
by guessmyname 10y ago
> We use an open source Ruby gem called Licensee to compare the
> repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses [...]
I have seen more people putting the license of their projects at the end of the README.md than in an individual LICENSE or LICENSE.md file which is what this feature analyzes. I noticed the addition of this feature a few days ago while checking the repository for the Atom.io project, but without an official blog post I was left thinking why none of my repositories (which are MIT licensed) were missing it. I guess reading LICENSE(\.md)? is good enough.
- cyphar 10y agoThe tool they use explains why they don't just scrape the entire repo. Basically it's because software licences are legally binding and it's not a good idea to put your license at the bottom of an FAQ in your readme. Licensing needs to be clearly deliberate.
- pluma 10y agoI think a less charitable explanation is that they hope this will pressure developers into making their license info more consistently available to the advantage of everyone -- like how Google adjusts its search ranking algorithm to punish certain kinds of behaviour/problems. ... which I would be perfectly okay with.
- cyphar 10y agoYeah, that's also a valid point. I've contributed license PRs to several projects, just so that the next person doesn't need to trawl through the readme or source code to find the one line that specifies the license in the most ambiguous way possible.
- franciscop 10y agoI created a command-line tool with basically three columns which are: - License.(md?) - README.md parsing the license - package.json reading the license (it's for NPM) To try to solve this exactly issue for a dependency tree: http://github.com/franciscop/ianal http://github.com/franciscop/ianal