Awesome
licensechecker (lc)
NOTE - this is under heavy development, and as such master does not currently work, see a release for a working solution!
lc is a command line tool that recursively iterates over a supplied directory or file
attempting to identify what software license each file is under using the list
of licenses supplied by the SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange) Project. It will pick up
license files named appropriately or inline licenses such as the below in source files
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-only
In a nutshell this project is a reimplementation of http://www.boyter.org/2017/05/identify-software-licenses-python-vector-space-search-ngram-keywords/ using Go while I attempt to nut out the nuances of the language.
It can produce report outputs as valid SPDX, CSV, XLSX, JSON and CLI formatted. It has been designed to work inside CI systems that capture either stdout or file artifacts.
Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.
Support
Using lc commercially? If you want priority support for lc you can purchase a years worth https://boyter.gumroad.com/l/vixqn which entitles you to priority direct email support from the developer.
Why
In short taken from, http://ben.balter.com/licensee/
- You've got an open source project. How do you know what you can and can't do with the software?
- You've got a bunch of open source projects, how do you know what their licenses are?
- You've got a project with a license file, but which license is it? Has it been modified?
Why should you care about what licenses your code runs under? See
- http://www.openlogic.com/resources/enterprise-blog/archive/use-spdx-for-open-source-license-compliance
- https://thenewstack.io/spdx-open-source-cheap-compliance-license-can-expensive/
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2839560/open-source-software/sticking-a-license-on-everything.html
Installation
The binary name for licencechecker is lc.
For binary files see releases https://github.com/boyter/lc/releases To build from source you need to have Go setup with your GOPATH working and your go binary path exported like so,
export PATH=$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin
then to install
$ go install
Usage
Command line usage of licensechecker is designed to be as simple as possible.
Full details can be found in lc --help.
$ lc --help
NAME:
licensechecker - Check directory for licenses and list what license(s) a file is under
USAGE:
lc [global options] [DIRECTORY|FILE] [DIRECTORY|FILE]
VERSION:
1.3.0
COMMANDS:
help, h Shows a list of commands or help for one command
GLOBAL OPTIONS:
--format csv, -f csv Set output format, supports progress, tabular, json, spdx, summary, xlsx or csv (default: "tabular")
--output FILE, -o FILE Set output file if not set will print to stdout FILE
--confidence 0.95, -c 0.95 Set required confidence level for licence matching between 0 and 1 E.G. 0.95 (default: "0.85")
--deepguess true, --dg true Should attempt to deep guess the licence false or true true (default: "true")
--filesize 50000, --fs 50000 How large a file in bytes should be processed 50000 (default: "50000")
--licensefiles copying,readme, --lf copying,readme Possible license files to inspect for over-arching license as comma seperated list copying,readme (default: "license,licence,copying,readme")
--pathblacklist .git,.hg,.svn, --pbl .git,.hg,.svn Which directories should be ignored as comma seperated list .git,.hg,.svn (default: ".git,.hg,.svn")
--extblacklist gif,jpg,png, --xbl gif,jpg,png Which file extensions should be ignored for deep analysis as comma seperated list E.G. gif,jpg,png (default: "woff,eot,cur,dm,xpm,emz,db,scc,idx,
mpp,dot,pspimage,stl,dml,wmf,rvm,resources,tlb,docx,doc,xls,xlsx,ppt,pptx,msg,vsd,chm,fm,book,dgn,blines,cab,lib,obj,jar,pdb,dll,bin,out,elf,so,msi,nupkg,pyc,ttf,woff2,jpg,jpeg,png,gif,bmp,psd,tif,tif
f,yuv,ico,xls,xlsx,pdb,pdf,apk,com,exe,bz2,7z,tgz,rar,gz,zip,zipx,tar,rpm,bin,dmg,iso,vcd,mp3,flac,wma,wav,mid,m4a,3gp,flv,mov,mp4,mpg,rm,wmv,avi,m4v,sqlite,class,rlib,ncb,suo,opt,o,os,pch,pbm,pnm,ppm
,pyd,pyo,raw,uyv,uyvy,xlsm,swf")
--documentname LicenseChecker, --dn LicenseChecker SPDX only. Sets DocumentName E.G. LicenseChecker (default: "Unknown")
--packagename LicenseChecker, --pn LicenseChecker SPDX only. Sets PackageName E.G. LicenseChecker (default: "Unknown")
--documentnamespace value, --dns value SPDX only. Sets DocumentNamespace, if not set will default to http://spdx.org/spdxdocs/[packagename]-[HASH]
--help, -h show help
--version, -v print the version
More information about what licensechecker looks at and how it works
Probably the most useful functionality is the -f modifier which specifies the output format.
By default licencechecker will print out results in a tabular CLI format. However as it was designed
to run at the end of CI tasks you may want to change it. This can be done like so.
$ lc -f tabular .
$ lc -f progress .
$ lc -f spdx .
$ lc -f csv .
$ lc -f summary .
The above will process starting in the current directory and print out a formatted list of results to the CLI when finished.
Example output of licencechecker running against itself in tabular format while ignoring the .git, licenses and vendor directories
$ lc -pbl .git,vendor,licenses -f tabular .
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Directory File License Confidence Size
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
. .gitignore (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 278B
. .travis.yml (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 192B
. CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 3.1K
. CONTRIBUTING.md (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 1.2K
. Gopkg.lock (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 1.4K
. Gopkg.toml (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 972B
. LICENSE Unlicense AND MIT 94.83% 1.1K
. README.md (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 10.6K
. UNLICENSE MIT AND Unlicense 95.16% 1.2K
. database_keywords.json (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 3.6M
. licensechecker.spdx (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 9.3K
. main.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 3.4K
. what-we-look-at.md (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 3.7K
examples/identifier LICENSE GPL-3.0+ AND MIT 95.40% 1K
examples/identifier LICENSE2 MIT AND GPL-3.0+ 99.65% 35K
examples/identifier has_identifier.py (MIT OR GPL-3.0+) AND GPL-2.0 100.00% 409B
parsers constants.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 4.8M
parsers formatter.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 8.5K
parsers formatter_test.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 1.3K
parsers guesser.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 9.8K
parsers guesser_test.go (MIT OR Unlicense) AND GPL-2.0 AND GPL-3.0+ 100.00% 4.8K
parsers helpers.go (MIT OR Unlicense) AND Apache-2.0 100.00% 2.4K
parsers helpers_test.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 2.8K
parsers structs.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 679B
scripts build_database.py (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 4.6K
scripts include.go (MIT OR Unlicense) 100.00% 951B
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To write out the results to a CSV file
$ lc --format csv -output licences.csv --pathblacklist .git,licenses,vendor .
Or to a SPDX 2.1 file
$ lc -f spdx -o licensechecker.spdx --pbl .git,vendor,licenses -dn licensechecker -pn licensechecker .
You can specify multiple directories as additional arguments and all results will be merged into a single output
$ lc -f tabular ./examples/identifier ./scripts
You can also specify files and directories as additional arguments
$ lc -f tabular README.md LICENSE ./examples/identifier
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Directory File License Confidence Size
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
README.md NOASSERTION 100.00% 11.3K
LICENSE MIT 94.83% 1.1K
./examples/identifier LICENSE GPL-3.0+ AND MIT 95.40% 1K
./examples/identifier LICENSE2 MIT AND GPL-3.0+ 99.65% 35K
./examples/identifier has_identifier.py (MIT OR GPL-3.0+) AND GPL-2.0 100.00% 409B
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SPDX
The ouput of SPDX is a valid SPDX 2.1 document. Validation was checked against the tools supplied by the SPDX group. Running master against itself to produce a SPDX and the validating using the tools from https://github.com/spdx/tools
$ go run main.go -f spdx -o spdx_example.spdx --pbl .git,vendor,licenses -dn licensechecker -pn licensechecker . && java -jar ./spdx-tools-2.1.12-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar Verify ./spdx_example.spdx
ERROR StatusLogger No log4j2 configuration file found. Using default configuration: logging only errors to the console. Set system property 'log4j2.debug' to show Log4j2 internal initialization logging.
03:49:29.479 [main] ERROR org.apache.jena.rdf.model.impl.RDFReaderFImpl - Rewired RDFReaderFImpl - configuration changes have no effect on reading
03:49:29.482 [main] ERROR org.apache.jena.rdf.model.impl.RDFReaderFImpl - Rewired RDFReaderFImpl - configuration changes have no effect on reading
This SPDX Document is valid.
Package
Run go build for windows and linux then the following in linux, keep in mind need to update the version
zip -r9 lc-1.0.0-x86_64-pc-windows.zip lc.exe && zip -r9 lc-1.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.zip lc
GOOS=darwin GOARCH=amd64 go build && zip -r9 lc-1.0.0-x86_64-apple-darwin.zip lc
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build && zip -r9 lc-1.0.0-x86_64-pc-windows.zip lc.exe
GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build && zip -r9 lc-1.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.zip lc
Most Common Software Licences
Source https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source-licenses
Source https://blog.sourced.tech/post/gld/pga-licenses.csv
Rank Open Source License %
1. MIT License 38%
2. GNU General Public License (GPL 2.0) 14%
3. Apache License 2.0 13%
4. ISC License 10%
5. GNU General Public License (GNU) 3.0 6%
6. BSD License 2.0 (3-clause, New or Revised) License 5%
7. Artistic License (Perl) 3%
8. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 3%
9. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0 1%
10. Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1%
11. Microsoft Public License 1%
12. Simplified BSD License (BSD) 1%
13. Code Project Open License 1.02 < 1%
14. Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1 < 1%
15. GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later < 1%
16. Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) < 1%
17. DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE < 1%
18. Microsoft Reciprocal License < 1%
19. Sun GPL with Classpath Exception v2.0 < 1%
20. zlib/libpng License < 1%
TODO
- Add error handling for all the file operations and just in general. Most are currently ignored
- Add logic to guess the file type for SPDX value FileType
- Add addtional unit and integration tests
- Investigate using "github.com/gosuri/uitable" for formatting https://github.com/gosuri/uitable
- https://web.archive.org/web/20180822173147/https://blog.sourced.tech/post/gld/
- https://github.com/boyter/boyter.org/blob/01601a2cafc2b2788b29b6943ad45ad40316d9a8/content/posts/improving-lc-performance.md
- https://reuse.software/
- /Users/boyter/Documents/projects/linux/LICENSES/preferred <-- add to the list
- https://github.com/go-enry/go-license-detector/blob/master/FAILURES.md