Finding out the licenses of JAR libraries

java maven-2 licensing jar identification
Prabhu R picture Prabhu R · Aug 17, 2010 · Viewed 10.6k times · Source

I use Maven to build my web app projects, when I add some dependent library to the pom file, it again adds some more dependent jars to the project recursively. Is there a way to find out or restrict that only jars having a certain type of license - say Apache License, BSD etc should be included. Or is there a way to find out that a jar file is under GPL/ASL etc without going to the website for each jar in the application?

Answer

Stephen C picture Stephen C · Aug 17, 2010

The Maven "Project Info Reports" plugin produces a Dependencies report that includes the Licenses for the dependencies. Here's an example.

Obviously, this depends on the dependent POMs declaring their dependencies properly, and it requires that you build your site documentation "online".

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