How do I list all licenses used in a maven project?

Question

I have a multimodule project that has a lot of dependencies. I want to check which licenses it had at a certain point, and see how many licenses were added since then. Is there an easy way to do this?

I found these plugins:

1. https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-project-info-reports-plugin/license-mojo.html
2. http://www.mojohaus.org/license-maven-plugin/examples/example-download-licenses.html

But neither of these give me exactly what I want. I have to do a lot of post processing after this. Is there a more direct way to see the list of licenses used in a maven project?

Answer 1

I've developed a website, https://www.licensediscovery.io, that will help Java developers to find licenses for the artifacts that they and their software are depending on.

Licensediscovery.io enables users to search for Java artifacts by using any of the following syntaxes: Maven, Gradle, SBT, Ivy, Leiningen, Grape, Buildr or plain. Licensediscovery.io will collect, parse and present all identifiable Java artifacts and present them and their licenses in either a table, bar chart, donut chart or a network graph.

You can easily export all Maven dependencies from your project into a plain-format dependency list and use it to search for licenses in LicenseDiscovery.io (An example is available under the 'Documentation'-section on the website). LicenseDiscovery.io will try to find all the artifacts and their corresponding licenses. The result can then be exported into a CSV file. You can download the result on fixed interval and then compare them over time.