It honestly would not be that difficult to implement something like this. Both the OSI and FSF maintain lists of "approved" licenses along with standard license text. In fact, Pivotal Labs has created a tool along these lines for Ruby: https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder , and the Leiningen project tool from Clojure allows for licenses to be specified in a machine parseable format: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/sample.... .