Something like this could be quite convenient.

The following spdx->guix license symbol converter
might save you some time:
http://paste.lisp.org/display/322105


- Jelle



2016-08-03 19:55 GMT+02:00 Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>:

> On Wed, 3 Aug 2016 18:28:38 +0200
> David Craven <david@craven.ch> wrote:
>
> > How can I tell the difference between a lgpl2.1 and lgpl2.1+ license?
>
> "or later"
>
> > Is this a job that an automated tool could do? Detecting licenses
> > included in a tarball?
>
> I also wonder about that. Usually, the license text is just copied &
> pasted anyway, so it should be quite regular.
>
> If there isn't one, I could write one which would basically, per source
> file,
> - try to find SPDX identifier, if that doesn't work:
> - ignore newline, "#" or ";" or "*" or "//" at the beginning of the line
> - lex that into words, where "word" is either [a-zA-Z0-9-]+ or [.,;]
> - try to 1:1 match with all the licenses similarily mapped
> - if that didn't work, try to find signal words and guess the license and
> print the difference in a short form.
>
> I could do that program in maybe 2 hours and find and extract all the
> official license texts in a few more hours. But does such a thing already
> exist? [Seems like something obvious to have and I'm writing many other
> things already.]
>
> A human would still have to review the non-1:1 things - there could always
> be strange exceptions in the README or whatever - but the majority of cases
> should work just fine.
>
> See also <https://spdx.org/licenses/> (especially <
> https://github.com/triplecheck/>), <
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121216300905> (also
> lists several license checkers; Fossology seems to be a whole webservice
> which does that).
>
>