Some MIT dependencies have a license of "LICENSE"

[mainej]

For example, on a project that bundles https://github.com/heroku/rails_12factor, LF says the license is LICENSE, even though the license file is MIT.

Also happens for https://github.com/heroku/rails_serve_static_assets

[flavorjones]

I've confirmed this behavior. Looking into it now.

[flavorjones]

So, this is happening because the rails_12factor gem v0.0.2 has the following gemspec packaged with it:

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
require File.expand_path('../lib/rails_12factor/version', __FILE__)

Gem::Specification.new do |gem|
  gem.authors       = ["Richard Schneeman", "Terence Lee"]
  gem.email         = ["richard@heroku.com", "terence@heroku.com"]
  gem.description   = %q{Run Rails the 12factor way}
  gem.summary       = %q{ Following best practices from http://12factor.net run a maintainable, clean, and scalable app on Rails}
  gem.homepage      = "https://github.com/heroku/rails_12factor"

  gem.executables   = `git ls-files -- bin/*`.split("\n").map{ |f| File.basename(f) }
  gem.files         = `git ls-files`.split("\n")
  gem.test_files    = `git ls-files -- {test,spec,features}/*`.split("\n")
  gem.name          = "rails_12factor"
  gem.require_paths = ["lib"]
  gem.version       = Rails12factor::VERSION
  gem.license       = 'LICENSE'

  gem.add_dependency "rails_serve_static_assets"
  gem.add_dependency "rails_stdout_logging"
end

the key point being this line:

  gem.license       = 'LICENSE'

and the file named LICENSE packaged in the gem is not MIT.

@mainej, what behavior do you expect from LicenseFinder under these circumstances?

(In the meantime, it looks like the licensing was changed for rails_12factor in this pull request, which was merged in May 2014. However, the gem has not been re-released since June 2013.

@schneems, would you consider pushing a new gem with updated license info?

[flavorjones]

I'm going to close this issues. @mainej, if you'd like to start a conversation about how, generally, LicenseFinder should handle inconsistent license metadata and/or references to unknown or non-existent licenses, I'd love to start that under a new issue. But I think there's nothing actionable around this issue right now.

[mainej]

@flavorjones agreed, this should be closed. Thanks for figuring out the source of the problem and requesting the rubygems version bump. In general gem/package metadata is much more reliable than any other heuristic license_finder uses. I think it's better to keep LF simple and accept that this sort of thing happens occasionally than to try to make LF handle every possible inconsistency.