dependency-and-license-policy

dependency-and-license-policy is a skill for Claude Code from shennawardana23/skillme. It costs 111 tokens per session (1,424 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A development guide for checking software dependencies and their licences before adding them to a project. A dependency is outside code your software uses, while a licence states how that code may be used and shared.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing, approving, or adding packages to projects, especially when shipping closed-source software that includes open-source code.
Why use it?
It helps avoid legal and technical problems caused by adding a library whose licence conflicts with a proprietary product or distribution plan.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the skillme plugin — 137 skills, 2 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it when reviewing, approving, or adding packages to projects, especially when shipping closed-source software that includes open-source code.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add shennawardana23/skillme --skill dependency-and-license-policy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/shennawardana23/skillme

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skillme, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 137 skills, 2 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for dependency-and-license-policy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for dependency-and-license-policy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/dependency-and-license-policy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,424 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00111 $0.01424
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00712
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00142

Measured 12d ago against content hash 204e34f3a556, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dependency-and-license-policy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/dependency-and-license-policy/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dependency and License Policy

Every dependency you add is a legal commitment, not just a technical one. Vet the license before the import, not after a customer's legal team asks about it during due diligence.

The core distinction: permissive vs. copyleft

Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD-2/3-Clause, Apache-2.0, ISC) let you use, modify, and ship the code inside proprietary software with no obligation to release your own source. Apache-2.0 additionally grants an explicit patent license — prefer it over BSD/MIT when patent exposure matters.

Copyleft licenses require derivative works to be distributed under the same license — this is the mechanism, not a matter of intent:

  • GPL (v2/v3): "strong" copyleft. Linking GPL code into your binary (statically or, for GPLv3's interpretation, in ways that create one combined work) generally obligates you to release your own source under GPL if you distribute the binary. This is why companies shipping proprietary software avoid GPL dependencies in anything that ships to customers.
  • LGPL: "weak" copyleft — a library under LGPL can be dynamically linked by proprietary code without that obligation propagating, as long as the LGPL component itself stays swappable/replaceable. Static linking or bundling in ways that prevent replacement can still trigger the obligation — this is the most commonly misunderstood distinction in the whole license landscape.
  • AGPL: extends GPL's obligation to network use — merely running AGPL code as a network service (SaaS) that users interact with over a network, without ever distributing the binary, still triggers the source-release obligation. This is why AGPL is often an outright ban at companies running SaaS products, even though GPL itself might be tolerable there.

Procedure: vetting a new dependency

  1. Identify the license. Check LICENSE/COPYING in the package repo, or go.mod's module page on pkg.go.dev, or npm view <pkg> license. Don't trust a README's one-line claim — read the actual license file; READMEs are sometimes stale relative to a license change.
  2. Classify it: permissive, weak copyleft (LGPL/MPL), strong copyleft (GPL/AGPL), or "custom/unclear" (source-available, dual-licensed, no-license-file). Custom and no-license-file cases require legal review before merge — never guess.
  3. Check how it's consumed: is it linked into a binary you distribute, run as a subprocess/separate service, or only used at build/test time (dev dependency)? A GPL build tool invoked as a subprocess and never linked into your shipped artifact is a fundamentally different exposure than a GPL library imported into your codebase.
  4. Check for license changes. Some widely used projects have relicensed mid-life (e.g., from a permissive license to a source-available or Business Source License) — pin and re-vet on every major version bump, don't assume the license you checked once still applies.
  5. Escalate, don't decide unilaterally, when you hit: AGPL anywhere, GPL in something distributed to customers, a custom/non-OSI license, or a "dual license" you don't fully understand. Flag to legal/engineering leadership with the specific clause in question.

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 110 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A 204e34f3a556

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dependency-and-license-policy is a skill published in the GitHub repository shennawardana23/skillme (2 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 1,424 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.