Google Code Search is pretty cool. Certainly, you’ll discover some oddities and troubling security issues, but I imagine that this might be helpful to a lot of folks looking for some quick fixes. I like that results will show the type of license if Google’s crawler can find it.

A funny query that someone on Slashdot pointed out makes me want to refactor some of my Actionscript code:

private static const POPE_IS_CATHOLIC:Boolean = true;

public function doSomething():void
{
	while(POPE_IS_CATHOLIC)
	{
		//do something
	}
}

It will be interesting to see if this and other code search engines help to discover GPL and other license violations. Obviously the code has to be accessible to the public for the crawler to find it, but I imagine that it’s still a useful tool in that realm.