Perl Script Extracts Software Licenses
Dec 31, 2009
A tiny script from U.S. network specialist Scott Iekel-Johnson extracts software licenses from source code. The oss-license-extract tool is now available in version 1.2.
The program in its current version searches through files with "license" and "copying" in their names, C source code and header files, and shell, Python, perl, Tcl and PHP scripts. It then produces a report with all copyright notices, authors and employed licenses, while eliminating duplicates. Iekel-Johnson wrote his scripts for his employer Arbor Networks to give him an overview of licenses before applying them or using them in distros.
The oss-license-extract 1.2 perl script is itself under BSD license as a tarball ready for download.