Github's license detection is messed up

[steveklabnik]

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/community links to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/COPYRIGHT

The docs don't make any mention of looking for COPYRIGHT.

#39897 suggests re-writing COPYRIGHT anyway.

I'd argue that we should

1. Remove the COPYRIGHT file.
2. replace it with a LICENSE.md file
3. The contents of such should point to our other license files.

This would not totally solve #39897, but it's a start. Hence this separate ticket.

What do you think, @rust-lang/core ?

[est31]

Github doesn't support dual licenses, so if we'd get it to display a license, it'd be not accurate. eg https://github.com/steveklabnik/rustdoc shows up as "Apache-2.0". I'm not sure whether that's wanted.

[est31]

As the missing support for dual licenses affects many official and unofficial rust projects, it might be something to contact Github about.

[codyps]

https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com

To detect what license, if any, a project is licensed under, we used an open source Ruby gem called Licensee

[steveklabnik]

eg https://github.com/steveklabnik/rustdoc shows up as "Apache-2.0".

heh yeah I wanted to tackle that after I tackle this.

Oh thanks @jmesmon !

[steveklabnik]

cc licensee/licensee#203

[steveklabnik]

also cc licensee/licensee#114 (comment)

[frewsxcv]

GitHub no longer incorrectly reports this repo as Apache-2.0. Should we fold this issue into #39897 ?

[steveklabnik]

Yup!