Project license is not displayed in the GitHub UI

[NevilleS]

GitHub supports a variety of features to display (and explain) OSS licenses; for example, see the VSCode repo here:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

You can see "MIT License" is there, it's clickable and takes you to the license file in the repo, etc.

We do have the Apache license in the /docs here, but we're not exposing that license in a way that GitHub detects.

[earmenda]

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository

Determining the location of your license

Most people place their license text in a file named LICENSE.txt (or LICENSE.md or LICENSE.rst) in the root of the repository; here's an example from Hubot.

Some projects include information about their license in their README. For example, a project's README may include a note saying "This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license."

As a best practice, we encourage you to include the license file with your project

Detecting a license

The open source Ruby gem Licensee compares the repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses. Licensee also provides the Licenses API and gives us insight into how repositories on GitHub are licensed. If your repository is using a license that isn't listed on the Choose a License website, you can request including the license.

If your repository is using a license that is listed on the Choose a License website and it's not displaying clearly at the top of the repository page, it may contain multiple licenses or other complexity. To have your license detected, simplify your LICENSE file and note the complexity somewhere else, such as your repository's README file.

https://github.com/ethyca/fides/blob/main/docs/fides/docs/license.md

Based on this, it's probably one of the following:

• Name of license file - ?
• Contents of license.md - I see other repos have had to update the content of their license file - random repo
• Location of license file - probably not

[ThomasLaPiana]

the license file isn't in the root, its in fidesctl....so we just need to move it up one directory?

[earmenda]

I'm not sure. I read licensee is used internally by github to i tried running it:

eduardoarmendariz@eth-27s-mbp fides % cd fidesctl 
eduardoarmendariz@eth-27s-mbp fidesctl % licensee 
License:        Apache-2.0
Matched files:  LICENSE
LICENSE:
  Content hash:  bec905d850e7f5dc2e2db78a950d4a9db560a0b8
  Confidence:    100.00%
  Matcher:       Licensee::Matchers::Exact
  License:       Apache-2.0

So our current repo has a license it can recognize at least. I think moving it to the root would be the thing to try, opened a pr #144

Not sure why it doesn't show up here though, maybe it takes time? - https://github.com/ethyca/fides/tree/earmenda-fix-license-github

[ThomasLaPiana]

might just need to be merged, either way it doesn't hurt to put it in the root anyway