GitHub detects the presence of README files by file name. It'd be pretty easy to do that for LICENSE files too of course. Look for LICENSE, MIT-LICENSE, etc.

GitHub detects the presence of README files by file name. It'd be pretty easy to do that for LICENSE files too of course. Look for LICENSE, MIT-LICENSE, etc. The trick is actually identifying what type of license it is. Pop quiz: What license is this? https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/master/LICENSE This problem would be perfect for a tiny ruby script like Linguist: https://github.com/github/linguist https://github.com/github/linguist. Just something simple that's given some filenames and contents that can return the license type. It'd also be nice to handle non software licenses, such as creative commons. I'm not sure what the convention is for specifying that in Git repositories, however.