License Compliance for C/C++

Problem to solve

Users are interested in license compliance for C/C++ projects.

Currently, we use license_finder for license management. It has experimental support for C/C++ projects via conan, see https://github.com/pivotal-legacy/LicenseFinder#experimental-project-types.

Anyway, it is not listed in our documentation: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/license_management.html#supported-languages-and-package-managers

We can consider if the support is good enough to be officially used and listed.

Target audience

• Sasha, Software Developer
• Sam, Security Analyst

Further details

We need a test project based on conan to check the feature. We also need to check if the current vendored version of license_finder has experimental C/C++ support.

Proposal

Check if we can use the experimental C/C++ support for conan to provide license compliance.

Enable it by default in our product, and update the documentation to reflect the list of supported languages/package managers.

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Number of C/C++ projects using the license compliance feature.