Licensee
Licensee is an open source license detection and compliance tool. It analyzes the dependencies in software projects to identify their licenses, highlight incompatible licenses, and give compliance advice.
license
compliance
dependencies
open-source
Licensee: Open Source License Detection and Compliance Tool
Identify open source licenses, detect incompatibilities and get compliance advice for your software projects with Licensee, an open source license detection and compliance tool.
What is Licensee?
Licensee is an open source command-line tool and Ruby gem created by GitHub that detects licenses of dependencies in software projects. It scans package manifests and file contents to identify licenses and license metadata of dependencies. Licensee matches this information against a curated list of known licenses to provide details on the dependencies' licensing.
Some key features of Licensee include:
- Detecting a project's declared license in standard locations like LICENSE files
- Scanning dependency manifests like Gemfile.lock, requirements.txt, and package.json to extract declared licenses of dependencies
- Scanning file contents looking for license headers and text similarities to known licenses
- Comparing licenses between transitive dependencies to flag incompatible licenses
- Providing tailored license notices and advice for improving compliance
- Available as a command-line tool and Ruby API for easy integration
Licensee aims to improve open source license compliance by giving developers more insight into their projects' dependencies and licenses. The tool helps to surface license incompatibilities and compliance issues early so they can be addressed.
Licensee Features
Features
- Detects licenses of dependencies
- Highlights incompatible licenses
- Provides compliance advice
- Command-line interface
- Web UI
- Integrates with GitHub
- Generates reports
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Free and open source
Easy to use
Comprehensive license detection
Customizable rules
Wide range of integrations
Active development community
Cons
Limited to scanning dependencies, not full codebase
Can generate false positives
Requires some setup and configuration
No official support services
Official Links
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