Re: License auditing

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 06:28:38PM +0200, David Craven wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> How can I tell the difference between a lgpl2.1 and lgpl2.1+ license?

The license headers in the source files will say if they are licensed
under version 2.1 or later. Something like this:

"...either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version."

I've heard that if the only license information is a copy of the full
license (for example, in LICENSE or COPYING) and the files have no
license headers, then the "or later" part is implied, but I'm not sure.

> Is this a job that an automated tool could do? Detecting licenses
> included in a tarball?

A tool might be able to suggest something, but I think that it will
always require human inspection. And we only have to do this inspection
once per package version, on behalf of everybody else that uses the
distribution.