licensing: default to concatenating with AND, add simple mode for license-check --fix#2057
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sil2100 merged 8 commits intochainguard-dev:mainfrom Jul 7, 2025
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… mode option for license-check --fix Signed-off-by: Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak <lukasz.zemczak@chainguard.dev>
Signed-off-by: Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak <lukasz.zemczak@chainguard.dev>
dannf
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Jul 2, 2025
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Nice! I've a suggestion inside about the flag name, but it's non-blocking
Signed-off-by: Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak <lukasz.zemczak@chainguard.dev>
… license-adjustments
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@dannf pushed some changes on top. The flag help description could use some expansion, but I'd recommend doing that as part of future changes. It's all very experimental right now! |
Signed-off-by: Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak <lukasz.zemczak@chainguard.dev>
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Rationale: even with our current license checking mechanism, listing out all the licenses properly will end up concatenating them in the package with an OR statement. This is bad. Think of GPL software containing some vendored MIT code - its SBOM will end up with a license string of "GPLv3 OR MIT", which is untrue and potentially dangerous as the code cannot be redistributed with a less restrictive license. Defaulting to AND is a safer bet.
There is an ongoing design and implementation effort to add ability to express relations to licensing: #2050 . But this is a big change and needs an actual design doc I'm afraid.
In the meantime, switching to AND seems a good bet, and I added a renovate
--simpleoption for the--fixmode that doesn't list all the licenses individually (with links to files) but simply deals with listing out just the licenses in one string. It's something we'll want to modify and do properly (listing all the files), but before we do, this is the only safe way of ensuring the person working on the licensing bits has power over relationships between the licenses listed out.--fixjust gives a guideline, nothing more.