Hi all!

Coming up with a list of licenses a binary is bound by is
a mind-boggling task that I avoid whenever possible.
I've been watching spdx and friends from afar for some time
in hopes they will help.

Recently I was asked to write a stateless, standalone tool that takes
a path to a
dynamically linked linux binary, and outputs an approximate list of licenses
the shared libraries it uses are bound by. Here's my current draft:
https://github.com/Oblong/obs/blob/master/ob-list-licenses

Roughly, it uses ldd and dpkg-query to locate copyright files
for all shared libraries it references, and then either
just outputs the License: values for DEP-5 copyright files,
or uses scancode to detect them for non-DEP-5 copyright files.

Now I'm plugging along, adding optional heuristics like
"XXX of dependencies can be filtered out (because I'm only interested
in the bits pulled in via dynamic linking)"
where XXX is "files: debian/*" and "files: doc/*"

Am I duplicating work?  I looked at fossology, but its complexity kind
of disqualifies it
(nothing about it seems standalone or stateless).

Thanks,
Dan