Kim Weins twisted the bytes to say:

Kim> Their are several commercial tools that do this, but we also feel that open
Kim> source tools will be critical. Today there are a couple of OSS tools that
Kim> can help find and identify open source licenses. One is FOSSology (created
Kim> and maintained by HP) which is available at fossology.org. They are also
Kim> hosting it at OSU's Open Source Lab. Another is ninka (
Kim> http://ninka.turingmachine.org/) which was created by Daniel German. I've
Kim> cc'd Daniel -- since you may want to talk to him about some of his
Kim> experience doing this. I don't believe FOSSology or Ninka will generate an
Kim> SPDX file (yet). We also have some free OSS tools on the spdx.org site that
Kim> can help you convert a software bill of materials from spreadsheet form into
Kim> SPDX format. However that assumes you already have the info about what open
Kim> source licenses are included.

I wrote some scripts that will actually do a decent job of generating an
SPDX document. The only (challenge|problem) is that Ninka does not recognized
many of the SPDX licenses. here is an example, using Linux as the Guinea pig:

http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/temp/linux-3.0.2.spdx.v0.1

Notice that this is not a true SPDX compliant document:

- It is licensed under the Creative Commons.
- It has some extra tags that I find useful.
- It does not contain a verification code.

--dmg

--
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org/
http://silvernegative.com/
dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca
replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .