alex VS license-checker

Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing with tools like alex

This story has been a motivating principle behind my life for a long time, and therefore, whenever I've worked on docs, I've thought about how I could ensure that exclusionary words, even unintentionally, did not make their way into the final copy. During my time at Nexmo, a communications API company, I introduced Alex, an NPM package that helps you identify potentially exclusionary language in your writing, into the CI/CD pipeline for the documentation.

As a philosophy student: Zotero for reference management, the Better BibTeX plugin to auto-generate a .bib file, and two language servers for diagnostics: LTeX for grammar- and spellchecking, and alex for style and sensitivity checking.

When using it as a lib you can pass a markdown string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#markdownvalue-config) or raw text string (https://github.com/get-alex/alex#textvalue-config). This will return an object that should contain everything you need to perform a naive replacement.

alex is a lovely command-line tool that takes in text or markdown files and, using retext-equality and retext-profanities, highlights suggestions for improvement. alex checks for gendered work titles, gendered proverbs, ableist language, condescending or intolerant language, profanities, and much more.

Heck, he could even go so far and start using GitHub's automation system (Actions) to run some check on his writing. (Maybe something like alexjs)

I've been a part of several code clean-ups where giant code bases needed to be changed to considerate language. I've never once encountered a bad actor when the actual work got underway. Part of being a programmer is to question the reasoning behind large changes but any programmer worth their salt understands the big picture if you can clearly explain it. I wouldn't read too much into the actions of a few people in any programming subreddit who are opposed to pronouns. Those people will always exist. I'm certain that the vast majority of programmers in those subs are either strongly in favour of gendered pronouns or are apathetic toward it. To drive home the point, the fight for considerate language has been driven by developers themselves. All these wonderful tools such as alex.js or even org level changes inside big companies are part of it.

alex

I thought that was a fairly weird question. A couple of our APIs run on Ubuntu, which contains GNU software. He has access to our source code, and I had also previously sent him the output of license checker so he really should have been able to answer this himself.

NPM License Checker

I don't care whether it's all in one file or in a dozen files, but I want all of that information to be available programmatically in a text file (unlike in a readme or on Github) in a standardized location in a project.

In that respect, package.json is a strict win. Your lack of willingness to use `git blame` to see why you added a line, or lack of reasonable git comments, is not to be blamed on the file.

Complexity is unavoidable. How could you write a tool like license-checker [1] for a Go-based project without having license information in a standardized location? Without the scripts section, how can you create a tool like husky [2] that automatically installs git hooks for a project? Every single part of package.json is there for a good reason; at best you could argue that putting some of it in other files would be aesthetically superior, but that's just bikeshedding.

Complexity isn't de facto bad. Some complexity is required if you want a certain level of functionality to become available. Deno (and Go) are slowly accumulating that "cruft" as people realize that those functions are actually useful or even critical to a mature ecosystem.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-checker

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/husky

Yes, all npm packages are supposed to have a valid SPDX license identifier, and there is an easy way to recursively check these values

For JavaScript I always used davglass/license-checker as a starting point but it's not being maintained anymore. Then I did similar things for the backend code, put everything together and sent it to the legal and security teams. At some point I thought "There must be a better way!". So, I started building sbomx about one and a half years ago. It's working fine enough to show it to the world and gather some feedback.

Check this package https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-checker

Good doctors and drivers make mistakes, too, and they still face liability for those mistakes.

I think that if your company is large enough, you should have employees, or pay someone, to mirror your dependencies and automate license checks. There are projects that do the latter already[1][2]. You can loop your lawyers in if licenses change to ensure you don't violate them. If (A)GPL code still ships in proprietary products, that's a process problem that the company needs to solve.

[1] https://github.com/dhatim/python-license-check

[2] https://github.com/davglass/license-checker

license-checker - Check licenses of your app's dependencies.

If you don't know what licenses you're currently using, I suggest the license-checker NPM tool.

Also, your IT dept is not entirely without concern here, you should be ensuring that you're not violating any open source licenses in your project, and be using something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-checker or an equivalent license checking service in your project language to ensure that everything is kosher