zachwick / homebrew-license

External command for Homebrew for fetching and displaying licensing information of formulae

homebrew-license

External command for showing the license(s) the given formulae are available under.

Install

brew tap zachwick/license

Usage

The most useful way to use the command is by invoking

$ brew license formula1

which will print out any known licensing info for that formula.

brew license formula1
brew license formula1 formula2 ...
brew license [-r|--recurse] formula1
brew license [-f|--fetch] formula1
brew license [-h|--help]

Usage:
Fetch and print the license(s) that the given formula is licensed under. Using `-r` will recurse through the dependency tree printing out `formulaX: License1` pairs.

Options:
-r, --recurse     recurse through the dependency tree and invoke `brew license <formula>` for each dependency
-f, --fetch       Attempt to fetch license information for the given formula via the Github License API
-h, --help        show this help message and exit

Contributing

Contributors to this project must read and abide by the Homebrew Code of Conduct.

If you like this project and you find it useful, help us by adding more licensing information or by improving the code (or the non-existing wiki, the readme, etc.).

We're especially open to contributions from people who are beginners to free and open-source software, and will gladly help you get your contributions merged.

Contributing Licensing Information

When adding licensing information for a formula, please make a single PR for adding just that formula's licensing information. There should be a 1:1 mapping of PRs to licensing data changes. This does add some manual toil creating a PR for a small change, but it allows the project to have an easy way to track each formula's licensing information.

Changelog

See the git log.

homebrew-license's Issues

Another batch of licenses

I've collected another few dozen licenses in this gist. There's a JSON file you can merge with the master licenses.json and a YAML file that includes URLs for reference.

This batch focuses on improving coverage for my personal brew leaves and the top ~250 formulae in general.

Yet another batch of licenses

Following on from #20 and #22, here is another gist of licenses in "canonical" JSON format, plus a YAML file w/ URLs.

(Where URLs are missing in the YAML file, licensing info was either self-evident—e.g. Apache projects—or extracted from a downloaded sourceball because I couldn't find a copy online.)

This completes licensing info for nearly all of the top 250 installed-by-request formulae.

License batch #4

I have now turned my attention to the list of most-installed formulae, period.

JSON for merging + YAML for reference are in this gist.

License naming

Hey @zachwick ,

I was just playing around to use GitHub API in order to pull the license information about the Formula from the GitHub API (in the formula is hosted there).

I got a lot of "different" results, but I noticed that most of them (if I compare them with what we already have) is difference i.e. GPL-2.0 vs GPL-2.0-only. So I started wondering, why do you include the -only or -or-later suffixes? I could ignore those, but I would like to know, why is is there?

Maybe will be also good to mention that in the README if you;'re going to keep it there for a reason.

PS: I will later create a PR with that script (will add that as brew command so that you can use that as well if you want 🙂

🍒 Low-hanging fruit

I've collected licensing information (with URLs) for about 60 formulae in this gist: https://gist.github.com/zgracem/2605d22bd3608f47a38d961cc9ab7bb5

Someone with better git skills than me would probably find it trivial to automate an import from that file with jq and hub. (I tried to structure it for that purpose, but didn't feel confident enough to follow through.)

How to contribute with licenses?

Hello @zachwick

When doing the PR I was actually wondering, how we, as a community, should contribute. If a lot of people start making PR for "random" formulas, I totally can see a "conflict hell" happening in the merging process.

I think it would be great to mention that the contribution section of the readme, i.e. 1 PR = 1 License change, therefore you won't have multiple PR conflicting. What do you think about it?

Add support for license info string "Public Domain (US)"

Just like how there is support for the licensing info string "Custom", we should have support for "Public Domain (US)". This is not an SPDX identifier, but we should support it as the imagesnap project uses this license and is available via homebrew. This issue arose in #22 where licensing information for imagesnap was supplied, but caused the SPDX test to fail.