Unknown Licenses [WAS Re: RAT with BuildBot at Apache]

[Robert Burrell Donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk>]

Gavin wrote:

<snip>

> Using the RAT report above, we have 9 unknown licenses.
> Unknown licenses includes no license at all so may need to re-word that,
> anyway ..

RAT uses heuristic reasoning. unapproved licenses are quite rare (mainly
 because RAT understands far too few headers ATM). so, most issues
reported are when RAT cannot deduce a license for a document, hence
'unknown license'. almost all of the time this is caused by an 'unknown
header'.

the best solution is to detached license information: for documents
which can't embed a header, a detached description of the license should
be used.

exclusions are ok for directories like target and local files, but for
documents in source control really license information is required for
all. so, probably as well as exclusions we need to be able to specify
license information for files.

on the command line perhaps something like:

-LApacheLicense20="src/test/SpecialTestFile.txt"

--license ApacheLicense20="src/test/SpecialTestFile.txt"

- robert