License of this project is not immediately obvious

[JacksonChen666]

This project is on GitHub (yes it is). There is no file called "LICENSE", but a folder called "LICENSES". GitHub didn't seem to pick up that folder, or what this project is licensed under, and isn't able to show what the project is licensed under in the sidebar. While the license is declared in the README, some users might not scroll to the bottom of the README which can tell what the project is licensed under (in this case LGPL-v3.0-or-later), thus not being immediately obvious what this project (libopenshot) is licensed under.

This project:

Example project with license file:

[JacksonRG]

Good to know! I'll look into getting our license to display

[JacksonChen666]

@JacksonRG if you're not sure what to do, open github and create a new file called "LICENSE". the license picker should show up beside the file name, and you can pick the license. then commit the contents of the file and it should work.

[JacksonChen666]

any follow up on this?

[JacksonRG]

None currently, but we haven't forgotten, and it's on our todo list.

[jonoomph]

Apparently this used to be visible on our GitHub page, but we switched to use the resuse format (which I am actually not a big fan of yet), and apparently this removed our license from GitHub. @ferdnyc Any thoughts on how to fix this? Thx

[ferdnyc]

Whoops, sorry, just saw this.

Yeah, the problem is that "the license" is at best a convenient fiction — the code contained inside the repo isn't under a single license. It's under five:

$ reuse lint | grep Used
* Used licenses: BSD-3-Clause, CC-BY-3.0, CC0-1.0, LGPL-3.0-or-later, MIT

That's not even counting the dependencies.

• libopenshot-audio adds GPL-3.0-or-later, as does FFmpeg
• Qt adds LGPL-2.0, Apache-2.0, and FTL, in addition to also using BSD-3-Clause and MIT
• (and so on.)

The open-source ecosystem has largely matured to an understanding of licensing that accepts that inherent complexity, and presents license information accordingly. (Hence the SPDX standard license identifiers that reuse employs). GitHub, however, hasn't gotten there yet. This is known to be an issue, but their response has largely been roughly, "We'd like to do this better, eventually..." IOW, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That being said, we can certainly do a better job in the README. It should probably explain, right at the start, what's covered under each of the licenses used in the project.

[JacksonChen666]

github is able to detect multiple licenses (very recent) and it works

...not sure what's gonna be done about that in this repo though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[stale[bot]]

Thank you so much for submitting an issue to help improve OpenShot Video Editor. We are sorry about this, but this particular issue has gone unnoticed for quite some time. To help keep the OpenShot GitHub Issue Tracker organized and focused, we must ensure that every issue is correctly labelled and triaged, to get the proper attention.

This issue will be closed, as it meets the following criteria:

• No activity in the past 90 days
• No one is assigned to this issue

We'd like to ask you to help us out and determine whether this issue should be reopened.

• If this issue is reporting a bug, please can you attempt to reproduce on the latest daily build to help us to understand whether the bug still needs our attention.
• If this issue is proposing a new feature, please can you verify whether the feature proposal is still relevant.

Thanks again for your help!

[JacksonChen666]

still not complete

[JacksonChen666]

I only recently discovered what REUSE was, and I had incorporated that into one of my projects. I've written in the LICENSE file roughly the following (actually it's extremely similar):

This project is compliant with the REUSE specification (). Information defined in that format takes precedence over all other copyright notices/licenses.

General rule of thumb:

• Source code is under MIT
• Content that's not source code is under CC-BY-4.0

Have the README point to the LICENSE file, and that's something helpful. Maybe that could be a starting point?

GitHub will detect the license as "Unknown", but that's better than nothing.