Fossology - analyzes a given set of software packages, and reports items such as the software licenses used by these packages.
public
group: Legal
Amazon - Wed, 2008-03-26 17:22
More than simply reporting, “Package X uses license Y,” the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package. A single package may be labeled as “GPL” but contain files that use other licenses (BSD, OSL, or any of the hundreds of other licenses). Even if an exact license is unknown, the license may be identifiable by common license phrases.
This may be a service we want to run on cvs.drupal.org to ensure license integrity.
Could be interesting
Especially given that we require everything in CVS be under the GPL, and if there are any "BSD so it's OK to re-license" type cases we want to keep track of them. However, most of our code files right now do not include license information at all. Would fossology be able to do anything with that, say trolling Google Code for code that looks the same?
It looks like it does do this
I had that question as well. Here's the answer:
"Fossology mines the top 1000 projects from Freshmeat on a nightly basis. Fossology uses the term mine to mean that it loads the software into its repository/db and does analysis on it. This is in contrast to doing an analysis on the XML Resource Definition File (Rdf) supplied by Freshmeat. Fossology also analyzes the Rdf file, as well, and produces statistics on it. The Rdf statistics will be one the fossology web site in the future."
http://fossology.org/mining_freshmeat
Whether this is enough (it also mines Fedora), or optimally-targeted is a different question.