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Prefer repository license if it doesn't match package license

Open andrew opened this issue 6 years ago • 0 comments

Before Christmas I was investigating with @tieguy the situation where a license is declared in a manifest file like package.json which is different from the license declared in LICENSE.

https://twitter.com/teabass/status/943093483228880898

This appears to happen when the package manager adds a license to the manifest file automatically and it's never fixed to match the actual license of the source code.

So in certain cases, when normalizing the license on a project I think we should prefer the repository license if:

  • the repository is present and declares a valid SPDX license string
  • the package has zero or one valid SPDX license declared
  • the package license does not match the repository license

Note: This is a bit of a stop-gap until we actually start inspecting the source code of published packages

andrew avatar Jan 02 '18 15:01 andrew