open source license scanner (heuristic, regular expression matches in subdirs)

Question

Assume you have a small collection of WebCMS assembled, subdirs in ~/www/test/ or so. And now you want to quickly/crude scan and detect the license in each project.

Is there a simple grep/perl/regex scanner which can guess the used licenses? Doesn't need to be exact or reliable, just for getting a rough overview, and just needs to inspect directory-wise.

Answer 1

ohcount, the tool http://ohloh.net/ uses to extract various metrics like number of lines per programming language from source code, also happens to have quite a lot of seemingly good heuristics to detect licenses. I haven't used it myself, but it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.