Try to guess license and make PR instead of issue.

[bf4]

Some repos only take PRs, but not issues.

I get asked periodically why I create issues and not PRs. So, here's an issue describing some of the technical concerns.

To do this, there's a number of things to consider, though there may be some mvp.

1. Is there a license file (accommodate spelling variants), and if so which license is it (match against known licenses)
2. Scrape the README for possible licenses
3. Figure out which file to change, the gemspec, the Rakefile, a custom gem task?
4. Determine if that change has already been made, but is unreleased
5. Handle multiple licenses
6. Tweaking the changes in the PR would now be dependent on my branch
7. I would end of forking quite a few repos!

Ironically, if there were a script good enough at guessing the license for a project, rubygems.org might not need to rely on the gemspec. 😄

Other concerns would be

• to make the PR attractive
• to ensure it is inline with Github ToS

[bf4]

See, for example:

• https://github.com/dblock/gem-licenses/blob/7e20513/lib/gem_specification.rb#L31
• https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder/blob/ca235fc/lib/license_finder/possible_license_files.rb

[bf4]

The license checkers in LicenseFinder now offer a pretty good list of various license names e.g.

# https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder/blob/ca235fc9f69eae54569aa71a0a894ef553e107be/lib/license_finder/license/simplified_bsd.rb
class LicenseFinder::License::SimplifiedBSD < LicenseFinder::License::Base
  self.license_url = "http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license"
  self.alternative_names = ["Simplified BSD", "FreeBSD", "2-clause BSD", "BSD-2-Clause"]

  def self.pretty_name
    'Simplified BSD'
  end
end