LicenseGuard

Does anything you depend on obligate you?

Paste a manifest. No signup. The answer depends on how you ship your software, so tell it that first.

The same license produces different obligations for each of these. Most scanners ignore the distinction.

Paste a package-lock.json if you have one. It covers transitive dependencies — where problematic licenses usually arrive — and carries exact versions. Pasted content is used to look up licenses and is not stored.

Why the shipping model decides it

AGPL-3.0 is the clearest case. Its section 13 obligation attaches when users interact with the software over a network, so a hosted SaaS triggers it while purely internal use does not. GPL works the opposite way: its obligations attach to distribution, so hosting is fine and shipping a binary is not. A scanner that reports "AGPL detected" without knowing which of these you are doing is telling you almost nothing.

The same applies to build-time dependencies. A tool that never ends up in your artifact cannot impose distribution obligations on it, yet most scanners warn about them anyway — which is how teams learn to ignore the warnings.

Browse license obligations →

LicenseGuard reports information derived from published license texts and dependency manifests. It is not legal advice and using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Results reflect license metadata as declared; they do not identify every obligation or violation. Consult qualified counsel for decisions that matter.