open-source-license-check

What This Skill Does

The open-source-license-check skill provides an automated, systematic approach to verifying the licensing terms of bioinformatics software and source code. In the highly collaborative field of bioinformatics, determining whether a library or tool is compatible with commercialization is critical for product development and regulatory compliance. This skill parses project files, scans for license identifiers (such as MIT, GPL, Apache, or BSD), and evaluates them against a predefined set of constraints regarding commercial usage, copyleft obligations, and proprietary integration.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, use the following command via the terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/aipoch-ai/open-source-license-check Ensure your environment meets the dependency requirements, specifically Python 3.10+ and any project-specific configuration files found in the references/ directory.

Use Cases

This skill is specifically designed for technical due diligence in scientific computing. Primary use cases include:

• Startups & Biotech: Screening open-source tools before integrating them into a proprietary pipeline to avoid viral GPL copyleft risks.
• Research Institutions: Ensuring compliance when downstream results or tools are shared with industry partners.
• Vendor Audits: Automating the license verification process during software procurement for bioinformatics data processing pipelines.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the license for the bioinformatics repository at ./projects/variant-caller-lib and verify if it allows commercial use in a closed-source product."
2. "Run an open-source license check on my current working directory; focus specifically on identifying any GPL-3.0 dependencies that might conflict with our commercial output requirements."
3. "Evaluate the licenses of all packages listed in requirements.txt and provide a summary report outlining which tools are MIT/Apache and which contain restrictive copyleft clauses."

Tips & Limitations

• Precision: While the skill provides clear categorization, it is a tool for developers, not legal counsel. Always verify automated results with legal experts for production-grade software deployment.
• Scope: The skill relies on scripts/main.py. Ensure your source files are correctly formatted and that license headers are present in the files for the highest detection accuracy.
• Configuration: Use the references/ folder to add custom domain-specific license definitions if your project utilizes less common or internal open-source licenses. Always execute a dry run using python -m py_compile scripts/main.py to ensure the environment is correctly configured before batch processing large repositories.