I wrote my first open source ruby gem today. It's a pretty simple idea - supply a Gemfile or Gemspec and the gem tries to determine which license each included library falls under, and thus whether you have any requirements you must abide by with your own project. Here's an example output:

>> deriving_license ~/Code/rails_sample_app/Gemfile
Determining license for rails:
Trying from_gem_specification strategy...FAILED
Trying from_scraping_homepage strategy...SUCCESS
Determining license for adt:
Trying from_gem_specification strategy...FAILED
Trying from_scraping_homepage strategy...FAILED
Trying from_license_file strategy...CUSTOM
Determining license for app_constants:
Trying from_gem_specification strategy...FAILED
Trying from_scraping_homepage strategy...SUCCESS
Determining license for bcrypt-ruby:
Trying from_gem_specification strategy...FAILED
Trying from_scraping_homepage strategy...FAILED
Trying from_license_file strategy...CUSTOM

...
    
Detected 4 known licenses:
MIT: Expat License (14 instances)[http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Expat]
Ruby: Ruby License (6 instances)[http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/license.txt]
BSD: FreeBSD Copyright (2 instances)[http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html]
GPL: GNU General Public License (2 instances)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License]
The following dependencies have custom licenses: adt, bcrypt-ruby, bootstrap-sass, rack-protection, sqlite3

You can grab it from https://rubygems.org/gems/deriving_license or just by running 'gem install deriving_license'. Let me know if it's useful to you, and feel free to fix it up and submit a pull-request!

In an effort to add more content to this blog without having to stay up until midnight writing (see my last two verbose posts), I'm going to start adding my better Quora answers here too. This is one of my favourites!

When I was 12 and professed an interest in computers and programming, this was the advice my friendly neighbour offerred. Being 12, I can't remember if I had a clever retort to this line, but it certainly struck with me.

The neighbour in question was an engineering manager, running a large enterprise team delivering various aspects of online voting systems for government (amongst other things.) That Australia still does not have online voting available to most of the population probably goes some way to explain his view. (For what it's worth, it's now available in NSW to disabled voters who can't reach a poling booth as a trial run of the service, which has been in development for over a decade. It is a complicated system due to all the negatives ramifications of stuffing it up, but this is still a stupidly long time!)

As I grew up, studied engineering, then physics, then robotics, and then ultimately ended up working as a software engineer (not a programmer? Here's why...), I've thought back to this line more often than you'd expect for such a throwaway remark. But the question that really bugs me is; was the remark engendered by his management of a large team of varying talents on a long, complicated, and tedious project? Or is there actually some truth to it?