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FAQ
The author and contributors to tools-licenses are not lawyers, and neither they nor tools-licenses itself provide legal advice. This is simply a tool that might help you and your legal counsel perform licensing due diligence on your projects.
Q. Are you an open source lawyer / why should I trust that you know anything about this stuff?
A. I am not a lawyer, and neither I nor this tool provide legal advice! But I did work for an open source software foundation (now part of the Linux Foundation) for some years, and as part of that role worked closely with the Foundation's legal counsel (an open source specialist) on matters including open source licensing, and more peripherally with other software license legals folks, the SPDX group, Linux Foundation staff, etc. As a result I have a perhaps-slightly-more-than-layman's understanding of this space, but more importantly a very great appreciation for how critically important due diligence is when using / incorporating 3rd party open source software.
Q. If this isn't legal advice, what is the point of tools-licenses?
A. To help expedite the inherently manual open source license due diligence you (should) perform on your projects.
Q. Why aren't the total license counts reported by the licenses and check-asf-policy tasks the same?
A. Because some dependencies have multiple license expressions, and the check-asf-policy task only uses the least restrictive one to categorise that dependency.
Q. I see Unidentified (<text>) in the output. What should I do?
A. Please raise an issue here, including the entire text within the parentheses, and ideally also the source (the file or dependency or whatever) that resulted in that output. This is highly likely to be a bug.