Dep: Github doesn't automatically recognize our license type

[carolynvs]

On the Go repository, github recognizes the license and makes it clear to uses what the name of the license is ("BSD 3-clause")

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/LICENSE
https://github.com/golang/dep/blob/master/LICENSE

Even though our license text is the same, github isn't recognizing it on ours however, which is causing confusion about what exactly the dep license is. I will dig in further and figure out why we aren't getting the same treatment, and then open a PR to fix (if it requires a text change), or at least call out the name/type of the license more clearly on the README (if we can't trick github into working).

[carolynvs]

I think the reason why is because there are LICENSE files in vendor/? That's the impression I got after reading how licensee works.

So it may be nice to just add the name of the license being used to our readme and at the top of the licencse file so that it's easy for people to know the type of license (otherwise you have to know based on the text of the license that it is a standard, named license).

[gjnoonan]

I was thinking along the same lines as @carolynvs so I created a test repo, with a LICENSE in the root, and than many different LICENSE files in a vendor like file structure. Github was able to detect the main Repository license.

[carolynvs]

The plot thickens! 🤔I’ll play with licensee directly and see if that yields any useful info on why github is hatin’ on our license.

[arbourd]

@carolynvs I tried that earlier in the week and I got the same metrics for both golang/go and golang/dep.

I think this is an issue with Github caching something improperly. Even when I deleted and committed the LICENSE on my fork, the problem persisted.

It might be worth reaching out to the folks at Github just to see if they can bust the cache and run it again 😅

[carolynvs]

I've contacted github for help.

[lostanlen]

[11 months later]
@carolynvs Hello, we are bumping on a similar problem on a different repository (kymatio/kymatio). Did you ever get a reply from GitHub?

[carolynvs]

They got back to me but weren't able to help. So I got stuck... If anyone knows more about this and wants to try to fix it, it's all yours. 😀

[techtonik]

@carolynvs so what is the output of https://github.com/benbalter/licensee ?