holtwick / what-license.com

Quickly check what license text you are facing

I am an enthusiastic software developer for web, mobile and desktop applications based in Germany. Currently I create and distribute free and commercial applications. Previously I have worked for large companies like Evernote and Cellular.

My goal is to develop appealing applications for communication and knowledge storage while creating the best possible privacy solution.

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what-license.com's Issues

LGPL missing

It appears all versions of LGPL are missing in the project.

Consider adding license identifiers

Nowadays lots of software pieces are put together via tools like composer.
In such cases a license identifier is provided in the config file (like composer.json).

SPDX has been declaring unambiguous license identifiers which should be preferred in such cases.
https://spdx.org/licenses/

Feature request: refer to this license identifiers, so that people are encouraged to use them.

Partial words matching?

it looks like partial words match (not a word-wise comparison), which disproportionately favors the GPL and other long licenses (with a lot of words). For instance, this is what it did with words "STEAM VR" and the GPL 3:

Didn't look at your code so I don't know your distance metric, but it might be useful to try some word-based comparison.

A way to use this from Firefox's context menu

I'm looking for a way I could invoke this on some selected text from Firefox's context menu. I was hoping I could add it as a search engine, but it seems you don't use a conventional HTML form submission mechanism, so one can't just do it from the context menu like one ordinarily might ...

Anyway, it would be nice to have some way of doing it.

Clarify "BSD license"

The project includes the BSD-3-clause license and refers to it as "BSD license".

Please do not use this term, as there are 3 different licenses (BSD-4-clause, BSD-3-clause and BSD-2-clause) that could be meant with it; some of which would be e.g. clearly incompatible with the GPL.

Mixup between versions of BSD licenses

I pasted in the license from here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/blob/master/LICENSE and it did show a pretty high match, calling it BSD license. However, when I clicked on the link, it took me to the OSI's page for the 2-clause BSD license, while the text in the "ranking of best matches" showed it matched against the 3-clause (because that's what it is) - you can actually see the third clause in the search results.

(By the way - thanks for this app, it's super helpful, the kind of thing I've been looking for and putting off writing myself 👍 )

Computation of match percentage

Related to #3 - it looks like the match percentage is based on the percent of the input license that is found in a given known license. With the partial-word effect, and the presence of really short (bsd/mit-style) input licenses and known really long (GPL) licenses, I see higher than expected matches with (for instance) the GPL on almost every open source license, and this license still gets a 55% match even though it's short and proprietary.

Perhaps compute the percentage both directions and take the minimum? If I correctly guessed at the inner workings, I'd imagine that would drop the GPL out of contention when it's not actually being sought. (However, the caveat is that it would not match the header boilerplate that it contains - might involve having the boilerplates for licenses that have them being in the database separately)

Is the server/domain down?

I can not access this awesome service now ... is there anything I can help?