Group: Software/research/FindingLicenses

Introduction

Often people working on FSDG compliant distributions end up having look for precise licensing information in software. For instance when packaging a given software you might want to try to find all the licenses.

In cases like that, it's often done by hand, but it might be interesting to also use tools for that (at least to find out what was missed when looking manually).

In addition there are some cases where doing that work by hand is too much time consuming. Both Android and Chromium are built in a repository where hundreds of git repositories are checked out and built in place, and nobody managed to review all the source code of Chromium yet. In addition if that review manages to be done one day, we would need to do it again for newer versions of Chromium.

The lack of package definitions during the build makes it really hard to understand under which licenses these software are.

While chromium per se isn't that interesting, a lot of applications depends on it source code through libraries like qt5-webengine or other frameworks to write applications.

Tools

TODO: review these projects (how easy they are to use, how well they work, if they are FSDG compliant, etc):

• scancode-toolkit: https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit