Years ago when I worked for Shogun, I was handed a compliance task: gather up all the LICENSE files from our codebase, so we could make sure all our products were legally compliant. It was not as easy as it sounded -- I had to use multiple different command line tools, merge all the results from the disparate tools together, and then manually verify that the data was correct. I made a mental note at the time that I should build something that made this easier one day.

Years later, I'm making good on that promise: introducing License Detector (https://licensedetector.com) -- a license detection tool that works across 21 ecosystems, basically every major language, and it's free in the web app for any open/public repo!

I'm also releasing the CLI for free as well (https://github.com/licensedetector/cli), so you can run it on your own repo before installing anything. The tool is ~80x faster than licensee, and matches or beats askalono and scancode-toolkit on accuracy in head-to-head benchmarks (I've included the benchmarks as well in the repo if you wish to run them yourself).

Hope people try it out and enjoy it, and would be glad to answer any questions!

CLI: go install go.licensedetector.com/cmd/license-detector@latest

GitHub App: https://github.com/apps/license-detector

Benchmarks & how it works: https://licensedetector.com/compare#how-we-stack-up

Why can't you combine .tar.gz files with cat?